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HERBERT HOOVER 

THE MAN AND HIS WORK 







/)Cs2^c^J2^y * 



HERBERT HOOVER 

THE MAN AND HIS WORK 



BY 

VERNON KELLOGG 

AUTHOR OF "HEADQUARTERS NIGHTS," ETC. 




D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

NEW YORK LONDON 

1920 






) 



£-302. 



COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 



■; 6 1S20 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



xr 

©CLA565820 



1,1° 



DEDICATED 

TO MY COMPANIONS OF THE 

C. R. B. 



PREFACE 

No man can have reached the position in the 
public eye, can have had such influence in the 
councils of our own government and in the 
fate of other governments, can have been so 
conspicuously effective in public service as has 
Herbert Hoover, without exciting a wide pub- 
lic interest in his personality, his fundamental 
attitude toward his great problems and his 
methods of solving them. This American, who 
has had to live in the whole world and yet has 
remained more truly and representatively 
American than many of us who have never 
crossed an ocean or national boundary line, is 
an object of absorbing interest today among 
the people of his native land. He is hardly 
less interesting to millions in other lands. He 
has carried the American point of view, the 
American manner, the American qualities of 
heart and mind to the far corners of the earth. 
He has no less revealed again, as other great 
Americans have done before him, these Ameri- 
can attributes to America itself. 

vii 



PREFACE 

Many questions are being asked about the 
life and experiences of this man before he en- 
tered upon his outstanding public service and 
about the details of his personal participation 
in the work of the great wartime private and 
governmental organizations under his direc- 
tion. 

This book is the attempt of an observer, as- 
sociate and friend to tell, simply and straight- 
forwardly, the personal story of the man and 
his work up to the present. 

V. K. 



V1U 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

Preface vii 

I. Children 1 

II. The Child and Boy 10 

III. The University 31 

IV. The Young Mining Engineer 59 

V. In China 80 

VI. London and the Rest of the World .... 102 

VII. The War : The Man and His First Service . . 124 
VIII. The Relief of Belgium ; Organization and 

Diplomatic Difficulties 140 

IX. The Relief of Belgium ; Scope and Methods 165 
X. American Food Administration ; Principles, 

Conservation, Control of Exports .... 199 
XI. American Food Administration ; General 
Regulation ; Control of Wheat and Pork, 

Organization in the States 225 

XII. American Relief Administration 256 

APPENDICES 

Appendix I 283 

Appendix II 291 

Appendix III 311 

Appendix IV 334 



HERBERT HOOVER 

THE MAN AND HIS WORK 
CHAPTER I 

CHILDREN 

It was a great day for the children of War- 
saw. It was a great day for their parents, too, 
and for all the people and for the Polish Gov- 
ernment. But it was especially the great day 
of the children. The man whose name they all 
knew as well as their own, but whose face they 
had never seen, and whose voice they had never 
heard, had come to Warsaw. And they were 
all to see him and he was to see them. 

He had not announced his coming, which 
was a strange and upsetting thing for the gov- 
ernment and military and city officials whose 
business it is to arrange all the grand receptions 
and the brilliant parades for visiting guests to 
whom the Government and all the people wish 
to do honor. And there was no man in the 
world to whom the Poles could wish to do more 

1 



HERBERT HOOVER 

honor than to this uncrowned simple American 
citizen whose name was for them the synonym 
of savior. 

For what was their new freedom worth if 
they could not be alive to enjoy it? And their 
being alive was to them all so plainly due to 
the heart and brain and energy and achieve- 
ment of this extraordinary American, who sat 
always somewhere far away in Paris, and 
pulled the strings that moved the diplomats 
and the money and the ships and the men who 
helped him manage the details, and converted 
all of the activities of these men and all of these 
things into food for Warsaw — and for all Po- 
land. It was food that the people of Warsaw 
and all Poland simply had to have to keep 
alive, and it was food that they simply could 
not get for themselves. They all knew that. 
The name of another great American spelled 
freedom for them; the name Herbert Hoover 
spelled life to them. 

So it was no wonder that the high officials 
of the Polish Government and capital city 
were in a state of great excitement when the 
news suddenly came that the man whom they 

2 



CHILDREN 

had so often urged to come to Poland was 
really moving swiftly on from Prague to 
Warsaw. 

Ever since soon after Armistice Day he had 
sat in Paris, directing with unremitting effort 
and absolute devotion the task of getting food 
to the mouths of the hungry people of all the 
newly liberated but helpless countries of East- 
ern Europe, and above all, to the children of 
these countries, so that the coming generation, 
on whom the future of these struggling peoples 
depended, should be kept alive and strong. 
And now he was preparing to return to his 
own country and his own children to take up 
again the course of his life as a simple Ameri- 
can citizen at home. 

But before going he wanted to see for him- 
self, if only by the most fleeting of glimpses, 
that the people of Poland and Bohemia and 
Servia and all the rest were really being fed. 
And especially did he want to see that the chil- 
dren were alive and strong. 

When he came to Paris in November, 1918, 
at the request of the President of the United 
States, to organize the relief of the newly liber- 

3 



HERBERT HOOVER 

ated peoples of Eastern Europe, terrible tales 
were brought to him of the suffering and whole- 
sale deaths of the children of these ravaged 
lands. And when those of us who went to 
Poland for him in January, 1919, to find out 
the exact condition and the actual food needs 
of the twenty-five million freed people there, 
made our report to him, a single unpremedi- 
tated sentence in this report seemed most to 
catch his eyes and hold his attention. It did 
more: it wetted his eyes and led to a special 
concentration of his efforts on behalf of the suf- 
fering children. This sentence was: "We see 
very few children playing in the streets of 
Warsaw." Why were they not playing? The 
answer was simple and sufficient: The chil- 
dren of Warsaw were not strong enough to 
play in the streets. They could not run ; many 
could not walk; some could not even stand up. 
Their weak little bodies were bones clothed 
with skin, but not muscles. They simply could 
not play. 

So in all the excitement of the few hours pos- 
sible to the citizens of Warsaw and the Gov- 
ernment officials of Poland to make hurried 

4 



CHILDREN 

preparation to honor their guest and show him 
their gratitude, one thing they decided to do, 
which was the best thing for the happiness of 
their guest they could possibly have done. 
They decided to show him that the children of 
Warsaw could now walk ! 

So seventy thousand boys and girls were 
summoned hastily from the schools. They 
came with the very tin cups and pannikins 
from which they had just had their special 
meal of the day, served at noon in all the 
schools and special children's canteens, thanks 
to the charity of America, as organized and 
directed by Hoover, and they carried their lit- 
tle paper napkins, stamped with the flag of 
the United States, which they could wave over 
their heads. And on an old race-track of War- 
saw, these thousands of restored children 
marched from mid-afternoon till dark in 
happy, never-ending files past the grand stand 
where sat the man who had saved them, sur- 
rounded by the heads of Government and the 
notables of Warsaw. 

They marched and marched and cheered and 
cheered, and waved their little pans and cups 

5 



HERBERT HOOVER 

and napkins. And all went by as decorously 
and in as orderly a fashion as many thousands 
of happy cheering children could be expected 
to, until suddenly from the grass an astonished 
rabbit leaped out and started down the track. 
And then five thousand of these children broke 
from the ranks and dashed madly after him, 
shouting and laughing. And they caught him 
and brought him in triumph as a gift to their 
guest. But they were astonished to see as they 
gave him their gift, that this great strong man 
did just what you or I or any other human sort 
of human being could not have helped doing 
under like circumstances. They saw him cry. 
And they would not have understood, if he 
had tried to explain to them that he cried be- 
cause they had proved to him that they could 
run and play. So he did not try. But the 
children of Warsaw had no need to be sorry 
for him. For he cried because he was glad. 

But the children of Warsaw were not the 
only children of Poland that Hoover was in- 
terested in and wanted to see. His Polish fam- 
ily was a large and scattered one; there were 
nearly a million children in it altogether, and 

6 



CHILDREN 

some of them were in Lodz and some in Cra- 
cow and others in Brest-Litovsk and Bielostok 
and even in towns far out on the Eastern fron- 
tier near the Polish-Bolshevist fighting lines. 
But of course he could not visit all of them, 
and much less could he hope to visit all the 
rest of his whole family in Eastern Europe. 
For while an especially large part of it was in 
Poland, other parts were in Finland, Esthonia, 
Latvia and Lithuania, and some of it was in 
Czecho-Slovakia and Austria, and other parts 
were in Hungary, Roumania, and Jugo-Slavia. 
Altogether this large and diverse family of Mr. 
Hoover's in Eastern Europe numbered at least 
two and a half million hungry children. And 
it only asked for his permission to be still 
larger. For at least a million more babies and 
boys and girls thought they were unfairly ex- 
cluded from it, because they were sure that 
they were poor and weak and hungry enough 
to be admitted, and being very hungry, and not 
being able to get enough food any other way, 
was the test of admission to Mr. Hoover's 
family. 

When the American Relief Administration, 
7 



HERBERT HOOVER 

which was the organization called into being 
under Hoover's direction in response to Presi- 
dent Wilson's appeal to Congress soon after 
the armistice, saw that its general assistance 
to the new nations could probably be dispensed 
with by the end of the summer of 1919, the 
director realized that some special help for the 
children would still be needed. The task of 
seeing that the underfed and weak children in 
all these countries of Eastern Europe, extend- 
ing from the Baltic to the Black Sea, received 
their supplementary daily meals of specially fit 
and specially prepared food, could not be sud- 
denly dropped by the American workers. 
There could be no confidence that the still un- 
stable and struggling governments would be 
able to carry it on successfully. But with the 
abolition of the blockade and the incoming of 
the year's harvest, and with the growing pos- 
sibility of adequate financial help through gov- 
ernment and bank loans, the various new na- 
tions of Eastern Europe could be expected to 
arrange for an adequate general supply of 
food for themselves without further assist- 
ance from the American Relief Administration. 

8 



CHILDREN 

Just what the nature and methods of this 
assistance were, and how the one hundred mil- 
lion dollars put into the hands of the Relief 
Administration by Congress were made to 
serve as the basis for the purchase and distri- 
bution to the hungry countries of over seven 
hundred million dollars' worth of food, with 
the final return of almost all of the original 
hundred million to the United States Govern- 
ment (if not in actual cash, at least in the form 
of government obligations), will be told in a 
later chapter. Also how it was arranged, with- 
out calling on the United States Government 
for further advances, that the feeding of the 
millions of hungry children of Eastern Europe 
could go on as it is now actually going on every 
day under Hoover's direction, until the time 
arrives, some time this summer, when it can be 
wholly taken over by the new governments. 

But just now I want to tell another story. 



CHAPTER II 

THE CHILD AND BOY 

The account of Mr. Hoover's sympathetic 
interest in the child sufferers from the Great 
War, and of his active and effective work on 
their behalf, makes one wonder about his own 
childhood. ] He is not so old that his childhood 
days could have been darkened by the one war 
which did mean suffering to many American 
children, especially those of the South. He 
was not born in the South, nor of parents actu- 
ally afflicted by poverty, and did not spend his 
early days in any of the comparatively few 
places in America, such as the congested great 
city quarters and industrial agglomerations of 
poor and ignorant foreign working-people, 
where real child distress is common ; so he cer- 
tainly did not, as a growing child, have his ears 
filled with tales of child suffering, or with the 
actual crying of hungry children. 

There was one outstanding fact, however, 
10 



THE CHILD AND BOY 

in his relations as a child to the world and to 
the people most closely about him, which may- 
have had its influence in making him especially 
susceptible to the sight of child misfortune. 
This is the fact that he, like many of his later 
wards in Europe, was orphaned at an early 
age. But he was by no means a neglected or- 
phan. So I hardly think that his own per- 
sonal experience as an orphan is a sufficient ex- 
planation of the passionate interest in the spe- 
cial fate of the children, which he displayed 
from the beginning of the war to its end. 

Nor can the explanation lie in the coldly rea- 
soned conclusion that the most valuable relief 
to a people so stricken by catastrophe that its 
very existence as a human group is threatened, 
is to let whatever mortality is unavoidable fall 
chiefly to the old and the adult infirm for the 
sake of saving the next generation on which 
alone the future existence of the group de- 
pends. This actual fact Hoover always 
clearly saw; but the thing that those close to 
him saw quite as clearly was that this alone 
accounted for but a small part of his intensive 
attention to the children. 

11 



THE CHILD AND BOY 

It is, then, neither any sad experience in his 
own life, nor any sociologic or biologic under- 
standing of the hard facts of human existence 
and racial persistence, that does much to ex- 
plain his particular devotion to the health and 
comfort of the millions of suffering children in 
Europe. The explanation lies simply, although 
mysteriously, in his own personality. I say 
mysteriously, for, despite all the wonderful new 
knowledge of heredity that we have gained 
since the beginning of the twentieth century, 
the way by which any of us comes to be just 
the sort of man he is is still mostly mystery. 
Herbert Hoover is simply a kind of man who, 
when brought by circumstances face to face 
with the distress of a people, is especially 
deeply touched by tjie distress of the children, 
and is impelled by this to use all of his intel- 
ligence and energy to relieve this distress. 
What we can know of his inheritance and early 
environment may indeed reveal a little some- 
thing of why he is this kind of man. But it 
certainly will not reveal the whole explanation. 

Herbert Hoover, or, to give him for once 
his full name, Herbert Clark Hoover, was born 

12 



THE CHILD AND BOY 



on August 10, 1874, in a small Quaker com- 
munity of Iowa which composed, at the time 
of his birth, most of the village of West Branch 
in that state. That is, he usually says that he 
was born on August 10, but sometimes he says 
that this important day was August 11. He 
seems to slide his birthday back and forth to 
suit the convenience of his family when they j 
wish to celebrate it. He does this on the basis, \ 
of the fact that when, in the midst of the gen- 
eral family excitement in the middle of the 
night of August 10-11, one of the busy Quaker 
aunts present bethought herself, for the sake 
of getting things straight in the family Bible, 
to say: "Oh, doctor, just how long ago was 
it that baby was born?" she got the following 
answer, "Just as near an hour ago as I can 
guess it." Thereupon she looked at the clock 
on the wall, and the doctor looked at his 
watch, and both found it exactly one o'clock of 
an important new morning! 3 

Herbert's Quaker father, Jesse Clark 
Hoover, died in 1880, and his Quaker mother, 
Hulda Minthorn, in 1884. The father had 
had the simple education of a small Quaker 

13 



HERBERT HOOVER 

college and was, at the time of Herbert's birth, 
the "village blacksmith," to give him the con- 
venient title used by the town and country 
people about. But really he was of that am- 
bitious type of blacksmith, not uncommon in 
the Middle West, whose shop not only does 
the repairing of the farm machines and house- 
hold appliances, but manufactures various 
homely metal things, and does a little selling 
of agricultural implements on the side. Jesse 
Hoover's mind was rather full of ideas about 
possible "improvements" on the machines he 
repaired and sold. And his two sons, Her- 
bert and Theodore, and Herbert's two sons, 
Herbert, Jr., and Allan, are all rather given 
to the same "inventiveness" about the home. 

Hulda Randall Minthorn Hoover, Her- 
bert's mother, was a woman of unusual 
mental gifts. After her husband's death 
she gave much attention to church work, 
and became a recognized "preacher" at 
Quaker meetings. In this capacity she re- 
vealed so much power of expression and ex- 
hortation that she was in much demand. Her 
death, in 1884, came from typhoid fever. 

14 



THE CHILD AND BOY 

Those who knew her speak of her "personal- 
ity." They say that she had color and attract- 
iveness, although she was unusually shy and 
reserved. One can say exactly the same things 
of her son Herbert. 

The immediate Hoover ancestry is Quaker. 
The more remote is Quaker mixed with Dutch 
and French Huguenot. The Dutch name was 
spelled with an e instead of the second o. All 
of Herbert's grandparents were Quakers, and 
the Quaker records run back a long time. One 
of the family branches runs into Canada, with 
the story of a migration there of a group of 
refugees from the American colonies during 
the Revolution. These emigrants came from 
prosperous farms in Pennsylvania, but while 
they wanted to be free from England's control, 
they could not, as Quakers, agree to fight for 
this freedom. So as the neighbors were inclined 
to be a little "unpleasant" about this, and as 
Canada was just then offering free farms to 
colonists, they packed up their movables and 
trekked north. 

Another Canadian branch, French Hugue- 
not in origin, has traditions of hurried removals 

15 



HERBERT HOOVER 

from France into Holland before St. Bar- 
tholomew's Night, and of later escapes into 
the same country. But all finally decided that 
Europe anywhere was impossible, and hence 
they determined on a wholesale emigration to 
Canada. Here by chance they settled down 
side by side with the little Quaker group which 
had come from Pennsylvania. Close associa- 
tion and intermarrying resulted in the Quak- 
erizing of the European Huguenots — their be- 
liefs were essentially similar, anyway — so in 
time all the descendants of this double Canad- 
ian line were Quakers. 

There were two other children in Jesse and 
Hulda Hoover's f amity : one a boy, Theodore, 
three and a half years older than Herbert, and 
the other a girl, Mary, who was very much 
younger. Theodore, like his younger brother, 
became a mining engineer, and after a dozen 
years of professional and business experience 
with mines all over the world — part of the time 
in connection with mining interests directed 
by his brother — is now the head of the gradu- 
ate department of mining engineering in Stan- 
ford University. 

16 



THE CHILD AND BOY 

After the father's and mother's death, the 
three Hoover orphans came under the kindly 
care of various Quaker aunts and uncles, and 
especially at first of Grandmother Minthorn. 
This good grandmother took special charge of 
little Mary, and pretty soon carried her with 
her out to Oregon, where she had a son and 
daughter living. There had been a little prop- 
erty left when the father died, enough to pro- 
vide a very slender income for each child. But 
if the dollars were few the kind relatives were 
not, and the little Hoovers never suffered from 
hunger. 

These relatives were not limited to Iowa, and 
the boy Herbert soon found himself in a new 
and strange environment, surrounded by a dif- 
ferent race of human beings, whose red-brown 
skin and fantastic trappings greatly excited 
his boyish wonder and imagination. For he 
was sent to live with his Uncle Laban Miles, 
U. S. Government Indian Agent for the Osage 
tribe in the Indian Territory, who was one of 
the many Quakers who had dedicated their 
lives to the cause of the Indians at that time. 
Here Herbert spent a happy six or eight 

17 



HERBERT HOOVER 

months, playing with some little cousins and 
learning to know the original Americans. For 
when other pastimes palled there were always 
the strange and wonderful red people to watch 
and wonder about. 

But his life among the original Americans 
was interrupted by the solicitous aunts and 
uncles, who, realizing that an abundance of 
barbarians and a paucity of schools might not 
be the best of surroundings for a child coming 
to its first years of understanding, decided on 
bringing him back into a more civilized and 
Quakerish environment; at least one less 
marked by tomahawks, bows and arrows, and 
other tangible suggestions of a most un- 
Quakerish manner of life. 

So he was sent back to Iowa, where he lived 
for two very happy years in the home of Uncle 
Allan Hoover. To this uncle, and to his wife, 
Aunt Millie, the impressionable boy became 
strongly attached. And there were some en- 
ergetic young cousins always on hand to play 
with. The older brother Theodore, or Tad, was 
living at this time with another uncle, a pros- 
perous Iowa farmer, also much loved by both 

18 



THE CHILD AND BOY 

of the boys. He lived near enough to permit 
frequent playings together of the two, and on 
another farm, with Grandmother Minthorn, 
was still the baby sister Mary, who was, how- 
ever, too young to be much of a playmate for 
the brothers. Indeed, the country all around 
bristled with the kindly uncles and aunts and 
other relatives and playmates, all interested in 
making life comfortable and happy for the 
little orphans. 

There was also an especially attractive lit- 
tle black-eyed girl, Mildred Brook, who lived 
on a near-by farm, who later went to the same 
Quaker academy at Oskaloosa as Theodore, 
and is now Mrs. Theodore Hoover. In those 
days she was known as "Mildred of the berry- 
patches," as all the children for miles around 
associated her in their minds with the luxuriant 
vines on the farm of her Uncle Bransome with 
whom she lived. Her home was the children's 
Mecca in the berry season. 

Herbert Hoover's memories of those days 
are filled with lively incidents and boyish farm 
adventure. There was the young calf, mutual 
property of himself and a cousin of like age, 

19 



v. 



HERBERT HOOVER 

which was fitted out with a boy-made harness 
and trained to work, eventually getting out 
of hand in a corn field and dragging the single- 
shovel cultivator wildly across and along rows 
of tender growing grain. Later the calf was 
restored to favor when it was triumphantly at- 
tached to a boy-made sorghum mill, which 
actually worked, and pressed out the sweet 
juice from the sorghum cane. 

Winter had its special joys of skates and 
sled; spring came with maple-sugaring, and 
summer with its long days filled with a thou- 
sand enterprises. There were fish in the creek 
which you might catch if you could sit still 
long enough, without too violent wiggling of 
the hook when the float gave its first faint in- 
dications of a bite. It was two miles to school, 
and most of the time the children had to walk. 
But that was only good for them, and there 
was, of course, a good deal of churchgoing and 
daily family prayers, but there were always 
convenient laps for tired little heads — being in 
church was the necessary thing, not being 
awake in church. 

It was a joyous and wholesome two years, 
20 



THE CHILD AND BOY 

the kind that thousands of Mississippi Valley 
farms have given to hundreds of thousands of 
American little boys ; the kind that gives them 
a good start in health and happiness towards 
a sturdy and simple adolescent life. But the 
time had come for young Herbert to learn 
new surroundings. For some reason, appar- 
ently not clearly remembered now, it was de- 
cided by the consulting uncles and aunts that 
young Herbert should go to Oregon, and join 
the Hoover and Minthorn relatives there. 
Perhaps, even probably, it was because of the 
presumably superior educational advantages 
of Oregon in the existence of the Newberg 
Pacific Academy that led to the decision. We 
may imagine that Herbert uttered no affirma- 
tive vote in the conclave that decided on his 
departure from the Iowa farm, and when he 
once got out to the superior place, he was less 
than ever in favor of the proceeding. But the 
conscientious uncles and aunts were inexorable 
as the Fates. 

They meant to be the kindest of Fates, of 
course. They knew that they knew so much 
better than the little boy what was best for 

21 



HERBERT HOOVER 

him. And probably they did. But this little 
pawn on the chessboard of life, moved about 
with ever so excellent intention by firm and 
confident hands, must have thought sometimes 
that he would have liked to have some little 
part in deciding these moves. But if one starts 
as pawn, one must find the way as pawn clear 
across the board to the king row before one can 
come to the higher estate of the nobler pieces. 
The actual going from Iowa to far-away 
Oregon was not so unbearable, because of the 
excitement of the tremendous journey and the 
actual fun of it. It was not made, to be sure, 
as Herbert would have preferred it, in a long 
train of picturesque prairie schooners, drawn 
up in a circle each night to repel attacking In- 
dians, as his storybooks described all trans- 
continental journeys; but in an overfull tour- 
ist-car on the railroad. Herbert's most vivid 
memories of the week's journey are of the won- 
derful lunch baskets and boxes filled with 
fried chicken, boiled hams, roast meats, count- 
less pies and layer-cakes, caraway-seed cookies, 
and great red apples. Herbert Hoover had no 
food troubles in those days ! 

22 



THE CHILD AND BOY 

Arrived in Oregon he found himself in the 
family of Uncle John Minthorn, his mother's 
brother, a country doctor of Newberg, and the 
principal of the superior educational institu- 
tion. Uncle John did not live on a farm, but on 
the edge of a small town, which was a mistake, 
according to Herbert's way of looking at it. 
And the Pacific Academy of Newberg, Ore- 
gon, could not be compared in interest with 
the district village school of West Branch, 
Iowa. 

After two or three years of life with Dr. 
John, young Herbert was handed over to the 
care of a Grandfather Miles, for Dr. John de- 
cided to give up country doctoring in order 
to go into the land business "down in Salem," 
the capital city. Therefore, as little Herbert's 
schooling in the academy which he was attend- 
ing all the time he was living with Dr. John, 
could not be interrupted, he was placed in the 
home of this Grandfather Miles on a farm just 
on the edge of the academy town. 

Herbert's life with Grandfather Miles does 
not seem to have been a very happy one, for 
the old gentleman did not believe in spoiling 

23 



HERBERT HOOVER 

little boys by too much kindness. There were 
many chores to do before and after school, and 
little time for playing. And the chores just 
had to be done, and not be forgotten as they 
sometimes were. Probably this strictness of 
discipline was a good thing for the small boy. 
But, like other small boys, he did not like it. 
So, also, like many other small boys, he decided 
to run away. 

Running away may not be the exclusive pre- 
rogative of young Americans, but some way 
it is hard for me to picture European boys of 
fourteen going off on their own. And yet per- 
haps they do. At any rate it is such a favorite 
procedure with us that hardly one of us — I 
mean by us, American males — has not had a 
try at it or connived at some neighbor's son 
trying it. My own experience was only that 
of a conniver. A schoolmate of thirteen, whose 
father believed in a more vigorous method of 
correcting wayward sons than my father did, 
ran away from his house to as far as our house. 
There my brother and I secreted him in a 
clothes-closet for the nearly three hours of 
freedom that he enjoyed in half-smothered 

24 



THE CHILD AND BOY 

state. Then the stern father came over, dis- 
covered him and haled him away to proper 
discipline. I shall never forget the howls of 
the captured fugitive, nor the triumphant and 
accusing remark to us, shouted by the terrible 
capturer as he dragged off his victim: "Now 
ye see what liars ye are !" For, of course, we 
had done our impotent best to throw the hun- 
ter off the track. It was several days before I 
could lie again without a violent trembling. 

But Herbert Hoover ran away for keeps. 
He did not run away to ship before the mast 
or to kill Indians. Nor did he run very far, 
only to Portland and to Salem, which his geog- 
raphy had already taught him were the prin- 
cipal city and capital, respectively, of the state 
of Oregon. And he ran away with the full 
knowledge and even tolerance of his relatives. 
But he went away to be independent, and to 
fit himself for the special kind of college to 
which he had already decided to go. In Salem 
he lived again with his Uncle John, helping in 
the real estate business, but in Portland he 
lived entirely on his own. 

That part of his reason for running away 
25 



HERBERT HOOVER 

which was connected with preparing for a col- 
lege of his own choosing seems to have come 
about because of a difference of opinion that 
had arisen between young Herbert and his 
Quaker relatives with regard to the future 
course of his education. They had taken it 
quite as a matter of course that from the lit- 
tle Quaker academy in ISTewberg he would go 
to one of the reputable Quaker colleges of the 
country. But Herbert had come to a different 
idea about this matter of further education, 
and, as is characteristic of him, this idea had 
led to a decision, and the decision was on the 
rapid way to lead to action. In other words, 
Herbert had made up his mind that he wanted 
to study science, and for that purpose wanted 
to fit himself for and go to a modern scientific 
university. Also, he wanted to be, just as soon 
as he possibly could, on an independent finan- 
cial f ooting.J^He probably did not express these 
wishes, in his boy's vocabulary, by any such 
large mouthful of phrases; he probably said 
to himself Jvl want to earn my own living, and 
go to a university where I can learn science." 
uTust what led him to the decision about the 

26 



THE CHILD AND BOY 

modern university and science is not easy for 
the grown-up Herbert Hoover of to-day to 
tell. But he is pretty sure that a large part of 
this determination came from the casual visit 
of a man whom he had never seen before and 
has never seen or heard of since, but who was 
an old friend of his father. 

This man, on his way through the town to 
look at a mine he owned somewhere in eastern 
Oregon, dropped off at Newberg so that he 
might see the little son of his Iowa friend. He 
was a "mining man," and, from the impression 
that Mr. Hoover still has of him, probably a 
mining engineer. He stayed at the local hotel 
for two or three days, and saw what he could 
of young Herbert between school-hours and 
chore-times. His conversation was apparently 
mostly about the difference in the work and 
achievements in the world of the man who had 
a profession and the one who had not. It was 
illustrated, because the speaker was a miner, 
by examples in the field of mining. The talk 
also was much about engineering in general 
and about just what training it was necessary 
for a boy to have in order to become a good 

27 



HERBERT HOOVER 

engineer, with much emphasis put on the part 
in this training which was to be got from a uni- 
versity. He also explained the difference be- 
tween a university and a small academy-col- 
lege. 

And then the man went on to his mine. He 
invited the fascinated boy to go with him for 
a little visit, but permission for this was 
not obtained. The trails of this man and Her- 
bert Hoover have never touched again, and 
yet this stray mining engineer, whose name, 
even, we do not know, almost certainly was 
more responsible than any other external in- 
fluence in determining Hoover's later educa- 
tion and adopted profession. 

In Portland Herbert got a job in a real es- 
tate office as useful boy-of-all-work, including 
particularly the driving of prospective pur- 
chasers about to see various alluring corner lots 
in town and inviting farmsteads in the sur- 
rounding country. For his work he received 
sufficient wages to pay for all of his very mod- 
est living. He had hoped to go to the high 
school to prepare himself for college, but found 
that he could not do this and earn his full 

28 



THE CHILD AND BOY 

wages at the same time. So as the wages were 
a first necessity, he gave up his high-school 
plans and devoted himself to study at nights 
and odd hours of the day. He discovered a 
little back room in the real-estate office half 
filled with old boxes and bags, of which no one 
else seemed to be aware, and this he fitted up 
with a bed, a little table and a lamp, and made 
of it, with a boy's enthusiasm — especially the 
enthusiasm of a boy who had known Indians — 
a secret cave in which he lived in a mysterious 
and exciting way. He slipped out to little 
restaurants and cheap boarding-places for his 
meals. 

He remembers once standing fascinated be- 
fore a sign that read: "Table d'hote, 75 cents"; 
but after thinking twice of indulging in a single 
great eating orgy, he decided that no human 
stomach, much less his own small one, could 
possibly hold all the food that seventy-five 
cents would pay for, and that therefore he 
could not get all of his money's worth. So he 
went on to some fairer bargain. 

There was a bank- vault just across the alley 
from his secret back room in the real estate 

29 



HERBERT HOOVER 

office, and many a night did young Herbert lie 
awake in his cave hearing his imaginary bank- 
robbers mining their way into the vault and 
escaping with much rich treasure. But mostly 
young Herbert studied in that secret cave of 
his, and that he studied hard and to good pur- 
pose is proved by the fact that in little more 
than two years he felt himself ready to attempt 
the entrance examinations for college. 



CHAPTER III 



THE UNIVERSITY 



<* 



For some time the newspapers had been full 
of accounts of the founding and approaching 
opening of Stanford University at Palo Alto, 
California. Soon after Leland Stanford, Jr., 
the only child of Senator and Mrs. Leland 
Stanford, died in Rome in 1884, the Stanfords 
announced their intention to found and endow 
with their great wealth a new university in 
California. The romantic character of the 
founding and the picturesque setting of the 
new university in the middle of a great ranch 
on the shores of lower San Francisco Bay, with 
the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains ris 
ing from its very campus, its generous pro- 
vision for students unable to meet the expenses 
of the older institutions of the East, and the 
radical academic innovations and freedom of 
selection of studies decided on by the Stanfords 
and David Starr Jordan, the eminent scientific 

31 



HERBERT HOOVER 

man selected to be the first president of the 
new university — all this, together with the evi- 
dent strong leaning of the institution toward 
science, as revealed by the character of the 
president, faculty and curriculum, combined 
to assure young Hoover that this was the 
modern scientific university of his dream, just 
made to order for him/) It was exactly the 
place where he could become a mining engineer 
like the wonderful man he had always remem- 
bered. ,vi 
\ So when it was announced in the Portland ~* 
papers that a professor from Stanford would 
visit the city in the early summer of 1891, to 
hold entrance examinations for the university, 
which was to open in the autumn, Herbert 
decided to try the examinations. \ But when 
he came to compare thoughtfully his store of 
knowledge with the published requirements he 
would have to meet, he found that his self- 
preparation had been rather one-sided. For 
in this preparation he had followed his inclina- 
tions more than the prescribed schedules of 
college entrance requirements. Why should 
one waste a lot of time, he had thought, and be 

32 



THE UNIVERSITY 

bored during the wasting, by studying gram- 
mar if one could already talk intelligibly to 
people? And why should one not revel in 
complicated problems of figures and geometri- 
cal designs that really took some hard thinking 
to work out, if hard thinking was just what 
one liked to do? 

So, much to his distress he found out, as the 
examinations went on, that he was decidedly 
unprepared in some of the required lines such 
as grammar, rhetoric, etc. And even in mathe- 
matics, his favorite study and the one in which 
he made his best showing, he had not been able 
to cover, in his limited time for study, the 
whole ground required for college entrance. 
He seemed doomed to be refused the coveted 
certificate of admission. 

C But the Fates worked for him. In the first 
place, Professor Swain, the examining profes- 
sor — now president of Swarthmore College — 
was the head of Stanford's department of 
mathematics. In the second place, he was a 
Quaker, and a man who liked the right sort of 
boys. And so a candidate who was a little 
weak in the languages, but was strong in arith- 

33 



HERBERT HOOVER 

\ 

metic and geometry — and was a brave Quaker 
boy, besides — was not to be too summarily 
turned down. ) 

This kind and wise examiner has described 
to me, recently, how he was first attracted to 
the young Quaker in the group of candidates 
/-before him by his evident strength of will. "I 
/ observed, \said President Swairy "that he put 
his teeth together with great decision, and his 
whole face and posture showed his determina- 
tion to pass the examination at any cost. He 
was evidently summoning every pound of en- 
ergy he possessed to answer correctly the ques- 
tions before him. I was naturally interested 
in him.\ On inquiry I learned that he had stud- 
ied only two books of Plane Geometry, and 
was trying to solve an original problem based 
on the fourth boo£) While he was unable to 
do this, he did much better ; for the intelligence 
and superior will he revealed in the attempt 
convinced me that such a boy needed only to 
be given a chance. \So although he could not 
pass all of the tests, I told him to come to my 
rooms at the hotel after the examinations, as 
I would like to talk with hinD| ( He came 

34 



THE UNIVERSITY 

promptly at the appointed hour with a friend 
of his, the son of a banker in Salem, Oregon. 
The two boys invited me and Mrs. Swain to 
stop at Salem to visit them, which we did. I 
learned there that Herbert Hoover, for that 
was the boy's name, was an industrious, 
thoughtful, ambitious boy earning his own liv- 
ing while he studied." 

All this was enough for the wise teacher. 
And an arrangement was mutually agreed on 
between examiner and examined to the effect 
that if young Hoover would work diligently 
for the rest of the summer on the literary neces- 
sities of the situation, and come on early to 
Stanford for a little special coaching, he might 
consider his probabilities for admission to the 
university so high as to be reckoned a sure 
thing. ) 

\Well, it all turned out as desired by both 
candidate and examiner. And Herbert Hoover 
was enrolled the following October among the 
first students, the "pioneer class" of Stanford 
University, and was actually the first Stanford 
student to inhabit the beautiful great new dor- 
mitory called Encina HalD It was not only 

35 ' 



HERBERT HOOVER 

his university of dreams come true, but it was 
really to be the university of his graduation, the 
alma mater of a boy without any other mother. 
And it was the university of which he was to 
become, in later successful years, a patron and 
trustee. Stanford did much for Herbert 
Hoover; but so has he done much for Stan- 
ford. 

Any university means many things, for all 
their lives, to those who have come timidly and 
wonderingly to its doors as boys and girls, 
and have gone out on that final day of happy 
reward and tearful good-byes as men and 
women eager to try themselves against the 
world outside of sheltered school-rooms. And 
most of these things are to most persons who 
have known them, things of pleasant and loving 
memory. 

Stanford is like any other university in this 
relation to its graduates. But there seems to 
be something unusually strong and yet at the 
same time unusually intangible in the ties that 
bind its former students to it. Perhaps the 
explanation lies as much in the special character 
of its students, at least its pioneer ones, as in 

36 



THE UNIVERSITY 

the special character of the institution itself. 
The students who came to Stanford in its earl- 
ier years came because it was different from 
other colleges, and because they did this it is 
likely that they themselves were different from 
other students. Like the restless, seeking pio- 
neers that came over the desert and mountains 
to the Pacific Coast to find a different life 
from that of worn tradition and old ways, their 
descendants and the later coming youth, who 
had mixed with them and been infected by 
their seeking spirit, flocked to this institution 
that offered a different kind of college atmo- 
sphere. 

Its low-arcaded quadrangle of mission build- 
ings of yellow stone and heavy red tiles, nest- 
ling under high hills that run back to moun- 
tains, surrounded by wide grain fields flecked 
with rounded live-oaks and tall strange euca- 
lyptus trees, and neighbored by great barns 
and well-kept paddocks and exercising tracks 
in which sleek trotting horses of famous Palo 
Alto breeding lounged or trained, was a 
strange new setting for studying Greek and 
Latin and mathematics and science. 

37 



HERBERT HOOVER 

"Die Luft der Freiheit weht" is the Stanford 
motto ; and there was truly no more likely place 
for the winds of freedom to blow than over 
and through this college on a California ranch. 
And its founders did well to find for its first 
head a man than whom no other American 
scholar had given clearer indications of being 
anxious to break with clogging scholastic tra- 
dition. 

The university itself, so tenderly conceived 
as a memorial to a boy lost to his parents, and 
so generously established as an opportunity 
for other boys, some of whom, like the hero of 
our story, might have had their parents lost 
to them, is an almost unique example of a great 
educational institution maintained by the for- 
tune of a single family. All of the Stanford 
millions are returned today to the country in 
which they were accumulated in the form 
of a great endowment and of the beautiful 
halls in which thousands of students have 
found a free training for independent ex- 
istence and right citizenship. These students 
wear the Stanford cardinal as a red badge of 
obligation, not anarchy. No other college in 

38 



THE UNIVERSITY 

the country had more of its sons and daughters, 
in proportion to their total number, devoting 
themselves to their country's service during the 
Great War. If Herbert Hoover was the most 
distinguished of the serving sons of Stanford 
he was not more eager and devoted than many 
others. 

But we leave Our Hero waiting too long 
upon the threshold of his dream university 
come true. It had been agreed, you remember, 
between young Hoover and his friendly ex- 
aminer in Portland that the candidate for ad- 
mission should come to the Stanford Farm — 
which is the students' name for the campus, 
and which literally described it in those begin- 
ning days — before the time of the opening of 
the university to be coached in the two or 
three studies in which his preparation was 
deficient. 

So he came down from the North a month 
before the announced time for opening, a lone- 
some boy without any friends at Stanford ex- 
cept the good Quaker professor of mathe- 
matics, and with all of his savings from the 
"real estate business" tucked away in an inside 

39 



HERBERT HOOVER 

pocket. They amounted in grand total to 
about two hundred dollars. 

It was less simple getting to Stanford in 
those first days than it is now. There was not 
even a beginning then of the beautiful thriving 
town of Palo Alto that stands today with con- 
venient railway station, just at the entrance to 
the long palm-lined avenue that runs straight 
up to the main university quadrangle. It was 
all grain field then, part of the great Hopkins 
estate, where now the college town welcomes 
the annually incoming Freshmen, and offers 
them convenient lodging places of all grades 
of comfort and quick trams and motor busses 
to the university. 

Young Hoover had to get off at Menlo 
Park, the station for a few great country 
houses of California railway and bonanza 
kings, which offered no welcome for small boys 
with a few saved dollars in their inside pockets. 
He had to find a casual hackman to carry him 
and his bag and trunk to the university a 
couple of miles away. But even there he found 
no place yet ready to house him. So someone 
advised him to go to Adelanta Villa, a mile or 

40 



THE UNIVERSITY 

more back from the university, in the hills, 
where a number of the early arrivals among 
the men of the new faculty were living. And 
there he did go, and found a warm and simple 
welcome and hospitality. He was soon en- 
sconced in the old mansion and doing odd jobs 
about the establishment to help pay for his 
board and lodging. 

Between jobs he was feverishly at work on 
the finishing touches for his final entrance tests, 
and probably quite as feverishly worrying 
about them. He felt pretty safe on every- 
thing but the requirements in English com- 
position. As a matter of fact, when he 
came to that fearful test he ignominiously 
failed in it, and, indeed, did not finally get 
the required credit in it until nearly ready 
to graduate ! But he was passed in enough of 
the entrance requirements to be given Fresh- 
man standing, "conditioned in English," a 
phrase not unfamiliar to other college stu- 
dents. He had, however, added something to 
his score by a Hooverian tour de force. 

Noting that a credit was offered in physi- 
ology, about which he knew nothing techni- 

41 



HERBERT HOOVER 

cally, he reasoned that as everyone, of course, 
knew already a little something about his in- 
sides and how they worked, one ought to be able 
to find out a little more from some textbook, 
and that the two littles might make enough for 
passing purposes. Thereupon with that 
prompt and positive reaction to stimulus which 
has been conspicuously characteristic of him 
all his life, he got a book, read it hard all of 
the day and night before the examination — and 
passed in physiology! 

The story of Herbert Hoover's college life 
reveals no startling features to distinguish it 
from the college careers of other thousands of 
boys, endowed with intelligence, energy, and 
ambition, but not with money, and hence forced 
to earn their living as they went along. Nev- 
ertheless it does reveal many of the main char- 
acteristics that we know so well today. For 
he did things all through those four years in 
the same way that he does them today, 
promptly, positively, and quietly. They were 
mostly already done before it was generally 
recognized that he was doing them. 

His two hundred dollars could not last long 
42 



THE UNIVERSITY 

even in a college of no tuition fees and an un- 
usually simple student life. He had to earn 
his way all the time, and he earned it by hard 
work, directed, however, by good brains. Many 
a story, most interesting but, unfortunately, 
mostly untrue, has been told of his various ex- 
pedients to earn the money necessary for his 
board and lodging, clothes, and books. Not a 
few of these stress his expertness as waiter in 
student dining-rooms. Undoubtedly he would 
have been an expert waiter if he had been a 
waiter at all. But he was not. A famous San 
Francisco chef has often been quoted in inter- 
esting detail as to the "hash-slinging" clever- 
ness of the future American food controller in 
the dining-room which this chef managed — by 
the way, just after Hoover left college — in the 
great Stanford dormitory in those early days. 
But, though interesting, these details are 
mythical. As are also the accounts of the care 
he took of professorial gardens, although that 
would have been an excellent substitute for 
the outdoor exercise and play which he found 
little time for in college except in geological 
field excursions and camps. Nor was he ever 

43 



HERBERT HOOVER 

nurse to the professorial babies, which also has 
been often placed to his credit by imaginative 
story-tellers. 

For at the very beginning of his college life 
Herbert Hoover and another distinguished son 
of Stanford, known to the early students as 
Rex Wilbur and to the present ones as Prex 
Wilbur — for he is now the university's presi- 
dent — put their heads together and decided 
that if they had any brains at all in those heads 
they would make them count in this little mat- 
ter of earning their way through college. And 
both of them did. 

In most of the things that Herbert Hoover 
did as a college boy to earn his needed money 
he revealed an unusual faculty for "organiz- 
ing" and "administering" which is precisely a 
faculty that as a man he has revealed to the 
world in highest degree. He organized, at 
some profit to himself, the system of collecting 
and distributing the laundry of the college boys 
which had been done casually and unsatisfac- 
torily by various San Jose and San Francisco 
establishments. He acted also as impresario, 
at a modest commission, for various lecturers 

44 



THE UNIVERSITY 

and musicians, developing an arrangement for 
bringing visiting stars from San Francisco to 
the near-by university. 

More important in its permanent influence 
on student activities was his work in reorgan- 
izing the system of conducting general student 
body affairs, especially the financial side of 
these affairs. In his Senior year he had been 
made treasurer of the student body and on tak- 
ing office found little treasure and much con- 
fusion. Each of the many student activities 
had its own separate being, its own officers and 
own funds — or debts — and a dangerous free- 
dom from general student control. Hoover 
worked out a system by which all control was 
vested in the officers of the general student 
body, and all funds passed into and out of a 
general treasury. The Hoover system of stu- 
dent affairs management prevails, in its essen- 
tial features, in the university today. 

In later years, as trustee of the university, 
he was the initiating figure in reorganizing the 
handling of all the institution's many million 
dollars worth of properties, and so his organ- 
izing genius is evidenced today at Stanford 

45 



HERBERT HOOVER 

both in the management of student activities 
and in the handling of the financial affairs of 
the whole university. 

But the work that he did in his student days 
that paid him best, because it brought him more 
than money, was that which he did partly for, 
and partly at the recommendation of his "ma- 
jor" professor, Dr. John Casper Branner, a 
great geologist and remarkable developer of 
geological students. 

Dr. Branner has been one of Stanford's 
greatest assets from the day of its opening in 
all his successive capacities as professor, vice- 
president, and president, and he still wields a 
benign influence on the institution as resident 
professor and president emeritus. It was the 
particular good fortune of young Hoover to 
find that his early decision to become a mining 
engineer, like the wonderful man who had vis- 
ited him in Newberg, led him, when he came 
to the university, into the class-rooms and lab- 
oratories of this kind and discerning scholar. 
Dr. Branner quickly discovered "good ma- 
terial," something that he was always looking 
for, in this industrious, intelligent, and ambi- 

46 



THE UNIVERSITY 

tious Quaker boy ; and Herbert Hoover found 
in his major professor not only a teacher but 
a friend, who, in both relations, has had a great 
influence, all for the best, in his life. It is 
an interesting illumination of the democracy 
of American education to note that while the 
professor became the university's president the 
student became one of its trustees. 

The first money-earning work that student 
Hoover did for Dr. Branner, except for vari- 
ous little jobs about the laboratory or office, 
was a summer's work on a large topographic 
model of Arkansas which that state was hav- 
ing prepared by Dr. Branner after a new 
method devised by him. Part of this summer 
was spent in the field in Arkansas and the rest 
of it wrestling with the model in the basement 
of the professor's house. 

Two summers were spent in work with the 
U. S. Geological Survey in the California 
Sierras around Lake Tahoe and the American 
River under Waldemar Lindgren, one of the 
greatest of American scientific mining engin- 
eers. This work was on the relations of the 
famous Sierra placer gold deposits to the 

47 



HERBERT HOOVER 

original gold-bearing veins and lodes, and re- 
sulted in tracing those comparatively recent 
placers back to the old mountain slopes and 
valleys. It was a fascinating problem success- 
fully carried through. The young geologist's 
association with Lindgren, whose standards of 
personal character and regard for the dignity 
and ethics of his profession were of the highest, 
was a source of much valuable education. 

All this summer activity was of value to 
young Hoover not only for the help it afforded 
him in his struggle for existence, and for the 
outdoor exercise it involved, but for the prac- 
tical experience in geological work which it 
gave him to mix in with his lecture room and 
laboratory acquisitions and to test them by. 
He seemed to have no difficulty in getting all 
of this kind of work he had time to do. In 
fact, some of the other students used to 
speak a little enviously and suggestively 
about "Hoover's luck" in this connection. Dr. 
Branner happened to overhear some re- 
marks of this kind from a group around a 
laboratory table one day and promptly broke 
out on them in his forcible manner. 

48 



THE UNIVERSITY 

"What do you mean," he said, "by talking 
about Hoover's luck? He has not had luck; 
he has had reward. If you would work half as 
hard and half as intelligently as he does you 
would have half his luck. If I tell any one of 
you to go and do a thing for me I have to come 
around in half an hour to see if you have done 
it. But I can tell Hoover to do a thing, and 
never think of it again. I know it will be done. 
And he doesn't ask me how to do it, either. If 
I told him to start to Kamchatka tomorrow to 
bring me back a walrus tooth, I'd never hear of 
it again until he came back with the tooth. And 
then I'd ask him how he had done it." 

Dr. Branner was as kind to his boys as he 
was stern when sternness was needed. Hoover 
came down with typhoid in his Junior year, just 
at a time when his finances could not afford 
such an expensive luxury. So Dr. Branner 
sent him to a hospital and saw that he was 
cared for by the best of physicians and nurses 
and told him to forget about paying for it all 
until after he had graduated. And that prob- 
ably meant that the good professor had to go 
for some time without buying books, which 



HERBERT HOOVER 

was what he usually did with his extra money. 

Another unfortunate illness was announced 
to the busy student by an outbreak of little red 
spots on his body which were declared by the 
college physician to be the result of poison 
oak. But they were not; they meant measles, 
and measles needs prompt attention. Un- 
fortunately young Hoover's neglected case 
affected his eyes to such an extent that for 
several years afterward he had to wear glasses. 
And out of this grew the familiar Stanford 
tradition that Herbert Hoover ruined his eyes 
while in college by over-much night work on 
his studies! 

As a matter of fact Hoover was no college 
grind. He studied hard enough at what he 
liked or thought important for his fitting to 
be a mining engineer, but he did not dodge get- 
ting a few credits from well-known "snap" 
courses, and he got through other required, but, 
to his mind, superfluous ones without doing 
much more work on them than necessary. He 
bad a disconcerting habit of starting in on a 
course and then if he found it uninteresting or 
unpromising as a contributor to the special edu- 

50 



THE UNIVERSITY 

cation he was interested in, of simply dropping 
out of the class without consultation or per- 
mission. But he did dig hard into what he 
thought really counted; his record in the ge- 
ology department was an unusually high one. 
But with all his work and study he found 
time for some other kinds of activity. At least 
the two Irwin boys, Will and Wallace, who 
were Stanford's most ingenious disturbers of 
the peace in pioneer days, claim that Hoover, 
in his quiet effective way, made a few contribu- 
tions of his own to the troubles of the faculty. 
But such contributions from others were gen- 
erally credited — or rather debited — to the 
more notorious offenders, so that they had to 
suffer not alone for their own brilliant inspira- 
tions but for those of other less conspicuous col- 
laborators. Wallace, for what seemed to the 
faculty sufficient reasons, was, as he has him- 
self phrased it, "graduated by request," while 
Will had his Senior year encored by the fac- 
ulty, so that it took him five years, instead of 
the more conventional four, to graduate. In 
fact, I remember that even as this fifth year 
was drawing near its close, the faculty com- 

51 



HERBERT HOOVER 

mittee of discipline, of which I was a reluctant 
member, seriously considered letting Will go 
in the same way that Wallace had gone. But 
some of us argued that if we should let Will 
graduate in the more usual way we should be 
rid of him soon anyway and without risking 
the bare possibilities of doing him an injus- 
tice. President Jordan always maintained that 
Will had good stuff in him, and he used his 
ameliorating influence with the faculty com- 
mittee. So Will Irwin is today one of Stan- 
ford's best-known alumni. 

Herbert Hoover's haunting trouble all 
through his college course was that unpassed 
entrance requirement in English composition. 
Indeed, he did not pass in it until about a week 
before he graduated, although he tried it regu- 
larly every semester all through his four years. 
How he finally got his passing mark has 
been told me by Mrs. Hoover. She knows be- 
cause she was there through most of the long 
agony. 

After failing regularly at each semester's 
trial principally, he thinks (and Mrs. Hoover 
is inclined to agree), because he always had 

52 



THE UNIVERSITY 

to take it under a particularly meticulous 
instructor, his predicament began to worry 
even his professors in the geology department. 
It looked as if their star student might not be 
allowed to graduate. Finally a date was set 
by the English department for a last trial be- 
fore the end of his Senior year. 

A day or two before this date the professor 
of paleontology, J. P. Smith, famed not only 
for his erudition but for his especial kindness 
to all geology students — especially if they did 
well in paleontology — ca/ne to the worrying 
Senior with a paper that Hoover had written 
sometime before on a paleontological subject, 
and said to him: "Look here, you will never 
pass that examination in the state you are in. 
Take this paper ; it's fine. Copy it in your best 
hand ; remember that handwriting goes a long 
way with professors of English ; look up every 
word in the dictionary to be sure you have got 
the right one; then put in all the punctuation 
marks you ever saw, and bring it back to me." 
Hoover did it. 

Then Professor Smith disappeared with the 
paper in his study, but soon came out with it, 

53 



HERBERT HOOVER 

abundantly blue-penciled. "Now take it and 
re-copy it with all these indicated changes, and 
bring it back again." Again the interested 
Senior obeyed his mentor. Then the professor 
left the laboratory with the paper in his hand. 
Hoover awaited his return with ever-increas- 
ing interest. Pretty soon he came back with 
a cheerful smile, handed Hoover the paper, and 
said: "Well, you've passed; although you prob- 
ably don't deserve it." 

Professor Smith, it seems, had carried the 
paper, not to the fatal instructor, but to the 
head of the English department and had said 
to him: "See here; your instructor is holding 
up the best man we have from graduating. 
Now look at this paper of Hoover's. Is there 
anything the matter with it? Doesn't it make 
good sense? Isn't it well written? Isn't it 
well punctuated?" 

The English head glanced over it impa- 
tiently — he was translating Dante, his dearest 
recreation, at the moment — and then roared 
out: "Well, it looks all right. I suppose In- 
structor X has to live up to the rules, but if 
the boy can do this well for you it's good 

54 



THE UNIVERSITY 

enough for us." And with his Dante pencil he 
wrote a large "Passed" across the paper. 

Someway all this does not sound like an ac- 
count of life at the conventional university. 
Nor does Professor J. P. Smith, who used to 
interrupt his lecture to wake up a dozing stu- 
dent with a sharp but kindly "Here, Jack, 
wake up, this is an important point and I will 
surely ask about it in examination," seem to be 
of the conventional type of professor. And 
most Freshmen coming to Yale or Harvard 
would hesitate a little before taking the advice 
of some workman about the campus to go, with 
bag and trunk, in search of board and lodging 
to a house full of professors. 

But as I said at the beginning, Stanford was 
different. It is precisely because it was, that 
Hoover's particular college experiences and ac- 
quisitions were what I have tried to suggest, 
and not what you might think they would be 
from your "knowledge of other universities. 
And while Stanford has converged somewhat 
with years toward the more usual university 
type — colleges get more alike as they get older 
— it has still an atmosphere peculiarly its own. 

55 



J 



HERBERT HOOVER 

But it was in the first days that this atmosphere 
was so very distinctive. Its president and fac- 
ulty and students, all living closely together in 
the middle of a great ranch of seven thousand 
acres of grain fields, horse paddocks, and hills 
where jack rabbits roamed and coyotes howled, 
were thrown together into one great family, 
whose members depended almost entirely on 
one another for social life. And each depart- 
ment was a special smaller family within the 
great one. Life was simple and direct and 
democratic. Real things counted first and 
most; there was little sophistication. Work 
was the order of the day; recreations were 
wholesome. 

The geology family was an especially close 
and happy one. Some of Dr. Branner's for- 
mer assistants and students had followed him 
out to California. They were the older mem- 
bers of the family. Almost all of them are now 
well-known geologists and mining engineers. 
So also are many of his younger ones. The 
family went on long tramps and camps to- 
gether. The region about Stanford is singu- 
larly interesting from a geologist's point of 

56 



THE UNIVERSITY 

view; and in those days it was a terra more or 
less incognita. Everybody was discovering 
things. It was real live geology. Lectures 
and recitations were illustrated, not by lantern 
slides, but by views out of the window and 
revelations in the field. 

And at the same time these young geologists 
learned real life; they had come to know inti- 
mately real men and women, all fired with the 
enthusiasm of a new venture, new opportuni- 
ties, and a high ideal. With all this, Herbert 
Hoover learned, in particular, one additional 
very important thing. He learned that a cer- 
tain unusual girl, beautiful, intelligent, and un- 
spoiled, a lover of outdoors, and, as proof of 
her unusualness, a "major" student in geology, 
was the girl for him. Having learned this he 
decided to marry her. And later, she decided 
that he had decided right. 

And so with all his experience at earning his 
living by organizing anything needing organ- 
izing, and with his stores of geological lore 
gained from lecture room and textbook and 
field work and close personal association with 
his able and friendly professors, and, finally, 

57 



HERBERT HOOVER 

with the knowledge that he had already found 
exactly the right girl for him, Herbert Hoover 
went out from Stanford, in 1895, with his Pio- 
neer Class, ready to open his oyster. But he 
had only himself to rely on in doing it. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE YOUNG MINING ENGINEER 

Herbert Hoover began his mining career 
very simply and practically by taking his place 
as a real workman in a real mine, with no fav- 
ors shown, following in this the emphatic ad- 
vice given by Dr. Brainier to every student 
graduating from his department. He went up 
into the mining region near Grass Valley in 
the Sierras where he had already studied with 
Waldemar Lindgren, and became a regular 
miner, a boy-man with pick and shovel work- 
ing long hours underground or sometimes on 
the surface about the plant. But always he 
had his eyes wide open and always he was 
learning. He preferred the underground work 
because he wanted first to know more about 
the actual occurrence of the ore in the earth 
than about the mill processes of extracting the 
mineral from it. 

59 



HERBERT HOOVER 

Here he worked for several months, and 
gradually rose to the position of night shift- 
boss or gang foreman. But he began to realize 
that he was exhausting the learning oppor- 
tunities of this particular place and kind of 
work, and so one night deep down in the mine, 
when for sudden lack of ore-cars or power or 
some other essential, work was held up for the 
last half hour of his shift, he went off into a 
warm corner, curled himself up in a nice clean 
wheelbarrow and slept away the last half hour 
of his pick and shovel experience. 

He had decided to get into association, some 
way, with the best mining engineer on the 
Coast. There was no question about who this 
was at that time. It was Louis Janin in San 
Francisco. So he appeared at Mr. Janin's of- 
fice as a candidate for a job, any job so that it 
was a job under Louis Janin. 

But the famous engineer, well disposed as 
he was toward giving intelligent, earnest 
young men who wanted to become mining en- 
gineers, a chance, had to explain that not only 
was there no vacant place in his staff but that 
a long waiting list would have to be gone 

60 



THE YOUNG MINING ENGINEER 

through before Hoover's turn could come. He 
added, as a joke, that he needed an additional 

typist in his office, but of course . 

The candidate for a job interrupted. "All 
right, I'll take it. I can't come for a few days, 
but I'll come next Tuesday, say." Janin was 
a little breathless at the rapidity with which 
things seemed to get settled by this boyish, very 
boyish, young man, but as they were appar- 
ently really settled he could only say, "All 
right." 

Now the reason that the new typewriter boy 
could not begin until next Tuesday — this was 
on a Friday — was that he had in the meantime 
to learn to write on a typewriter ! Trivial mat- 
ter, of course, in connection with becoming a 
mining engineer, but apparently necessary. 
So learning what make of machine he would 
have to use in the office, he stopped, on his 
way to his room, at a typewriter shop, rented 
a machine of proper make, and by Tuesday 
had learned to use it — after a fashion. 

That kind of boy could not remain for long 
a typist in the office of a discerning man like 
Louis. Perhaps certain idiosyncrasies of 

61 



HERBERT HOOVER 

spelling and a certain originality of exe- 
cution on the machine helped bring about a 
change of duties. But chiefly it was because 
of a better reason. This reason was made espe- 
cially clear by an incident connected with an 
important mining case in which Janin was 
serving as expert for the side represented by 
Judge Curtis Lindley, famous mining lawyer 
of San Francisco. The papers which indicated 
the line of argument which Judge Lindley and 
Mr. Janin were intending to follow came to 
Hoover's desk to be copied. As he wrote he 
read with interest. The mine was in the Grass 
Valley region that he knew so well. He not 
only copied but he remembered and thought. 
The result was that when the typewriter boy 
delivered the papers to the mining engineer 
they were accompanied by the casual statement 
that the great expert and the learned attorney 
were all wrong in the line of procedure they 
were preparing to take ! And he proceeded to 
explain why, first to Mr. Janin's indignant sur- 
prise but next to his great interest, because the 
explanation involved the elucidation of certain 
geologic facts not yet published to the world, 

62 



THE YOUNG MINING ENGINEER 

which the type-writer boy had himself helped 
to discover during his work in the Grass Valley 
region. 

The outcome was that Janin and his new boy 
went around together to Judge Lindley's of- 
fice where after due deliberation the line 
of argument was altered. The further 
result was that the boy parted from his type- 
writer, first to begin acting as assistant to vari- 
ous older staff men on trips to various parts of 
the Coast for mine examinations, then to make 
minor examinations alone, and finally to handle 
bigger ones. The letters from the young min- 
ing engineer to the girl of the geology depart- 
ment, still at Stanford, came now in swift suc- 
cession from Nevada, Wyoming, and Idaho, 
and then very soon after from Arizona and 
New Mexico. Little mines did not require 
much time for examination and reports signed 
"Hoover" came into Janin's office with bewild- 
ering rapidity. Janin liked these reports ; they 
not only showed geological and mining knowl- 
edge, but they showed a shrewd business sense. 
The reporter seemed never to lose the perspec- 
tive of cost and organization possibilities in 

63 

i 



HERBERT HOOVER 

relation to the probable mineral richness of the 
prospects. And the reports said everything 
they had to say in very few and very clear 
words. 

Herbert Hoover was not only moving fast; 
he was learning fast, and he was rising fast in 
Janin's estimation. He had a regular salary 
or guarantee now with a certain percentage of 
all the fees collected by Janin's office from the 
properties he examined. What he was earning 
now I do not know, but we may be sure it was 
considerably more than the forty-five dollars 
a month which he had begun with as typewriter 
boy, a few months before. 

The work was not entirely limited to the 
examination of prospects and mines. In one 
case at least it included actual mine develop- 
ment and management. Mr. Janin had in 
some way taken over, temporarily — for such 
work was not much to his liking: he preferred 
to be an expert consultant rather than a mine 
manager — a small mine of much value but 
much complication near Carlisle, New Mex- 
ico. This he turned over to his enterprising 
assistant to look after. 

64 



THE YOUNG MINING ENGINEER 

It was Hoover's first experience of the kind, 
and it was made a rather hectic one by condi- 
tions not technically a regular part of mining. 
The town, or "camp," was a wild one with 
drunken Mexicans having shooting-bees every 
pay day and the local jail established at the 
bottom of an abandoned shaft, not too deep, 
into which the prisoners were let down by 
windlass and bucket. It was an operation 
fairly safe if the sheriff and his assistants 
were not too exhilarated to manage the wind- 
lass properly, or the malefactors, too drunk 
to hang on to the bucket. Otherwise, more or 
less regrettable incidents happened. Also, it 
led to a rather puzzling situation when the 
sheriff had to take care of his first woman pris- 
oner, a negro lady of generous dimensions and 
much volubility. 

But the mine was well managed and Hoover 
acquired more merit with his employer. And 1 
soon came the new chance which led to much 
bigger things. It was now the spring of 1897, 
two years after Hoover's graduation, and the 
time of the great West Australia mining boom. 
English companies were sending out many 

65 



HERBERT HOOVER 

engineers, old and young, to investigate and 
handle mining properties in the new field, and 
were looking everywhere for competent men. 
Janin was asked by one of these London firms 
to recommend someone to them. He talked it 
over with Hoover, telling him that it might be 
a great opportunity. It might, of course, not 
be; it would depend on the prospect — and the 
man who handled it. Janin expressed his en- 
tire confidence in the young man before him, 
and his belief that the opportunity was greater 
than any the Pacific Coast then had to offer. 
He would be more than glad to keep Hoover 
with him, but he wanted to be fair to him and 
his future. The young man was all for giving 
hostages to fortune, and so the recommenda- 
tion, the offer, and the acceptance flew by cable 
between San Francisco and London, and 
Hoover prepared to start at once to England 
for instructions, as had been stipulated in the 
offer. 

Just before he started, however, Janin 
caused him some uneasiness by saying, "Now 
look here, Hoover, I have cabled London 
swearing to your full technical qualifications, 

66 



THE YOUNG MINING ENGINEER 

and I am not afraid of your letting me down 
on that. But these conservative Londoners 
have stipulated that you should be thirty-five 
years old. I have wired that I was sorry to 
have to tell them that you are not quite thirty- 
three. Don't forget that my reputation de- 
pends on your looking thirty-three by the time 
you get to London !" And Hoover had not yet 
reached his twenty-third birthday, and looked 
at least two years younger even than that. He 
began growing a beard on his way across the 
continent. 

The London firm had stipulated, too, that 
their new man should be unmarried. Hoover 
was still that, although he had begun to get 
impatient about what seemed to him an un- 
necessary delay in carrying out his decision 
already made in college. As a matter of fact, 
there was still no definite engagement between 
him and the girl of the geology department, 
but there was an informal understanding that 
some day there might be a formal one. So 
Hooved appeared before the head of the great 
London house — perhaps the greatest mining 
firm in the world at that time — without en- 

67 



HERBERT HOOVER 

cumbering wife and with the highest of recom- 
mendations, but with a singularly youthful 
appearance for an experienced mining engin- 
eer of thirty-five. In fact, the great man after 
staring hard at his new acquisition burst out 
with English directness, "How remarkable you 
Americans are. You have not yet learned to 
grow old, either individually or as a nation. 
Now you, for example, do not look a day over 
twenty-five. How the devil do you do it?" 

The days were daj^s of wonder for the home- 
grown young Quaker engineer. Across 
America, across the ocean, then the stupendous 
metropolis of the world and the great business 
men of the "city," with week-ends under the 
wing of the big mining financier at beautiful 
English country houses with people whose 
names spelled history. And then the P. and 
O. boat to Marseilles, Naples, Port Said, Aden, 
and Colombo, and finally to be put ashore in 
a basket on a rope cable over a very rough sea 
at Albany in West Australia. There he was 
consigned, with the dozen other first-class pas- 
sengers, mining adventurers like himself, to 
quarantine in a tent hospital on a sand spit out 

68 



THE YOUNG MINING ENGINEER 

in the harbor with the thermometer never reg- 
istering below three figures, even at night. 

And then he came to the Australian mine 
fields themselves in a desert where the tem- 
perature can keep above one hundred degrees 
day and night for three weeks together. Also 
there is wind, scorching wind carrying scorch- 
ing dust. And surface water discoverable only 
every fifty or sixty miles. Of course one ex- 
pects a desert to be hot and dry — that's why 
it is a desert — but the West Australian desert 
rather overemphasizes the necessities of the 
case. It is a deadly monotonous country al- 
though not wholly bare; there is much low 
brush just high enough to hide you from others 
only half a mile away ; a place easy to get lost 
in, and hard to get found in when once lost. 

All of this desert was being prospected by 
thousands of men of a dozen nationalities, all 
seeking and suffering, for gold. The railroad 
had got in only as far as Coolgardie, but the 
prospectors were far beyond the rail head. 
They carried their water bags with enough in 
them to keep themselves and their horses alive 
between water holes. In the real "back blocks" 

69 



HERBERT HOOVER 

they could not carry enough for horses, so they 
used camels with jangling bells and gaudy 
trappings of gay greens, orange, scarlet, and 
vivid blues, making strange contrasts with the 
blue-gray bush. Along the few main roads 
moved dusty stages, light, low, almost spring- 
less three-seated vehicles, with thin sun-tops 
overhead and boxes and bags in front, behind 
and underneath, and all swarmed about by pes- 
tilential flies, millions of flies, sprung from no- 
where to harass the thirsty, weary travelers. 

But only the agents and engineers rode in 
the stages ; it cost too much for the little pros- 
pectors, the "dry-washers," who carried their 
few provisions and scanty outfit in packs on 
their backs, and tramped the trails, stopping 
here and there to toss the dry soil into the air 
and watch for the gold flakes to fall into the 
pan while the lighter earth blew off in the wind. 

In the camp were gathered a motley crew, 
mostly hard, reckless men, who drank and bet 
their gold dust away as fast as they found it. 
But everywhere they were finding gold, and 
all the time came new reports and rumors of 
more farther on. The headquarters of Hoov- 

70 



THE YOUNG MINING ENGINEER 

er's employers were in Coolgardie when he ar- 
rived, but were soon moved on to Kalgoorlie, 
following the railroad. The offices were in one 
of the three or four stone, two-story buildings, 
which lifted themselves proudly above the 
ruck of sweltering little toy-like houses of cor- 
rugated iron. Forty thousand people were 
supposed to be living in this "camp" at one 
time, buying water at two shillings six pence 
the gallon, which was cheap — they were pay- 
ing seven shillings in some other camps. At 
first it was all brought by rail from the coastal 
plains four hundred miles away, but when the 
mines began to get down they struck water at 
a few hundred feet. But it was salt, and ex- 
pensive condensing plants had to be set up, 
which kept the price still high. Coolgardie 
once boasted of having the "biggest condens- 
ing plant in the world," with rows on rows of 
enormous cylindrical corrugated iron tanks ly- 
ing on their sides, over acres of ground, with 
all the pumps and boilers and steam pipes to 
keep these tanks supplied. Water was cheap 
there, only twelve or fifteen shillings the hun- 
dred gallons. 

71 



HERBERT HOOVER 

But out in the prospects and on the trails 
there was no such aqueous luxury. There was 
no water for washing and little to drink. And 
that little was mostly drunk as a terrible black 
tea, like lye, heated and re-heated, with now a 
little more water added, now another handful 
of leaves. I have a well-vouched-for story of 
an Australian girl who went into this gold- 
paradise with her husband who was manager, 
at a large salary, of one of the first mines. She 
used to take a cupful of water and carefully 
wash the baby and afterward the little girl, and 
then herself. After that it was saved for the 
husband to rinse the worst off when he came 
home from the mine. But he could have an 
additional half cup to finish with because he 
was so dirty. And they tried not to use soap 
with it so that finally, after letting it settle, it 
could be added to the horses' drinking water. 
It was not that the family could not afford to 
pay for water, but there was simply no water to 
buy. 

Into this cheerful hell came the young 
Quaker engineer, from the heaven of Cali- 
fornia and the "city" offices of London where 

72 



THE YOUNG MINING ENGINEER 

sat the big men who were intent on having 
their share of the big things in West Aus- 
tralia. He was to do his best for his particular 
big men, but how he was to do it was mostly 
for him to find out. His firm had already ac- 
quired interests in several promising proper- 
ties. He was to help develop these mines and 
perhaps to find new ones to be taken on. A 
junior member of his firm was already on the 
ground when Hoover arrived, but he remained 
only a few months. It was a long way to Lon- 
don and Hoover could get few instructions. 
It was up to him. It was a hard life with 
many opportunities to go wrong in any of 
many ways. But he kept his brain clear, his 
body and soul clean, and just everlastingly 
worked. 

There were all kinds of work to do, and all 
sorts of new things to learn about mines and 
mining. The ore occurred in the rock in a man- 
ner different from that in any other known 
gold field, so finding it and getting it out, and 
then getting the mineral out of the strange new 
kind of ore, required resourcefulness, "original 
research," as the scientists say, and constructive 

73 



HERBERT HOOVER 

imagination. And the technical problems of 
discovering and manipulation once solved, 
there was still needed organization, system, and 
administration to make the mine a paying one. 

But all these things were exactly the young 
engineer's specialties. He was from the be- 
ginning, as we already know, and conspicuously 
is today, resourceful, original, capable of 
prompt decision, an organizer and adminis- 
trator. Although there were many trained en- 
gineers in West Australia, there was no one to 
equal him in these specialties of his. And very 
soon his firm's mines, which had so far had lit- 
tle benefit of executive ability coupled with 
technical knowledge and originality, began to 
pay and their stocks went up on the London 
market — which was the criterion of success in 
the eyes of the men in the "city." About the 
stock ratings Hoover knew little and perhaps 
cared less. He did care, however, about mak- 
ing good mines out of bad ones. And that was 
exactly what he was doing. 

And very soon he did the other successful 
thing that the big men in London hoped for 
and that he kept always working for. He un- 

74 



THE YOUNG MINING ENGINEER 

covered the big new mine. He had turned up 
several promising leads but their development 
proved disappointing. But the "Sons of 
Gwalia" realized his hopes from the beginning. 
It was out from Kalgoorlie four or five days 
hard riding, near a smaller camp called Leo- 
nora. He went out and took personal charge 
of the opening up and equipping of the whole 
mine and plant, living in a little "tin" house and 
gathering about him a staff of the best of the 
firm's assistants collected from all over the 
Colony. It was hot, although the climbing 
mercury usually stopped at about one hundred 
degrees. But that only further inflamed the 
enthusiasm of the group. They had the real 
thing, and they had a real leader — a very boy- 
ish looking boy of scant twenty-five. They 
forgot to watch the thermometer. They were 
more interested in water and transportation 
and labor and all the other things that are as 
necessary to a good mine as the gold in the 
ore-veins. 

Occasionally, however, they had some re- 
laxation. For one thing, they thought some- 
times about food. One of the men had his wife 

75 



HERBERT HOOVER 

with him, and she imported chickens and later 
even ducks which never, however, set web-foot 
in water. And they had a garden because they 
decided they were so in need of green vege- 
tables. They turned a little priceless water 
from the condenser into the garden; but not 
enough for the vegetables and too much for 
the accountant's books. After estimating that 
the one undersized cabbage they raised cost 
them £65 worth of water, he discouraged 
further gardening. 

They had also a pet emu. So did the wife 
of the manager of another mine near-by. They 
used to arrange to have the emus meet occa- 
sionally and there was always a glorious fight. 
Once when they had got the lady's emu over 
for a visit, one of the Australian boys thought 
it would look amusing in trousers. So he took 
off his overalls and after immense exertion got 
them on the legs of the creature, with the straps 
securely fastened over its neck and back. But 
the great bird became so enraged that the men 
could not safely get near enough to it to get 
off its clothing, and even its mistress feared 
ever to approach it again. There was also a 

76 



THE YOUNG MINING ENGINEER 

pet goat named Sydney that ate several boxes 
of matches and had to have its internal fires 
extinguished by the only available liquid, which 
was the tinned butter that had yielded to the 
one hundred and ten degrees. Sydney lived 
through the experience but had always after 
that a delicate interior and was petted more 
than ever in consequence. And there was a 
tennis court occasionally wetted down with the 
beer that always went stale while they were 
saving it for state occasions. It was all a 
happy, glorious time — because they had discov- 
ered and were making one of the great mines 
of West Australia. 

Hoover was now twenty-four, and a man of 
large reputation in mining circles in Australia 
and London, with a salary to correspond. He 
had spent about twenty-four months in West 
Australia, although they ran over all of one 
and parts of two other years, so that he is gen- 
erally credited with having remained there 
three years. And he could have gone on among 
the Australian mines for as many years as he 
liked, for the big men in London now fully 
realized that they had in this young American 

77 



HERBERT HOOVER 

engineer the unusual man, and that his only 
limit in Australia would be the limit of the pos- 
sible. But the new opportunity and the new 
experience were calling., 

Just about this time a young Chinaman of 
royal family in Peking had made a successful 
coup d'etat and had formed a cabinet for the 
first time in the history of China, and this cab- 
inet decided, naturally also for the first time 
in the history of China, to effect a coordinated 
control of all the mines of the Empire. There 
was, therefore, established a Department of 
Mines, with a wily old Chinaman, named 
Chang Yen Mow, at its head. He understood 
that Chinamen knew little about mining, and 
hence decided to find a foreigner to help him 
manage the mines of the Empire. He also 
thought that a foreigner, thus attached as an 
official to his department, could be of particu- 
lar help to him in dealing with other foreigners 
inclined to exploit Chinese mines more for their 
own benefit than China's. This official was 
to be in a position much like that of an under- 
secretary in a cabinet department, and 
was to be given the title, in the Chinese equiva- 

78 



THE YOUNG MINING ENGINEER 

lent, of "Director-General of Mines." He was 
to have a salary appropriate to such a large 
title. With all this decided, it only remained 
to find the proper foreigner, who should be a 
man who knew much about mines and was hon- 
est. There was, as we know, just such a man in 
Western Australia. 



CHAPTER V 



IN CHINA 



When Chang Yen Mow, the new head of 
the new Department of Mines of the new Chi- 
nese Government, began to look about for the 
foreigner who should know much about mines 
and be honest, and who would therefore be a 
fit man to occupy the new post of Director- 
General of Mines, he bethought himself of an 
English group of mining men with whom he 
had once had some business relations. The 
principal expert advisor of this group had 
been the man who was now the head of the 
great London mining firm for which Herbert 
Hoover was working, and working very suc- 
cessfully, in West Australia. Chang applied 
to this group for a recommendation of a suit- 
able man for him. And this group in turn ap- 
plied to the head of Hoover's firm. Or, per- 
haps, Chang applied directly to the great Lon- 

80 



IN CHINA 

don mining man. The exact procedure, which 
is not very important, anyway, by which the 
head of Hoover's firm came to have the oppor- 
tunity of making the recommendation, is a lit- 
tle obscure today. The important points in 
the whole matter, however, which are not at 
all uncertain, are that he did have it, and that 
he recommended Herbert Hoover, and that 
Chang Yen Mow, acting on the recommenda- 
tion, offered the place, through him, to the 
youthful Quaker engineer, and, finally, that 
the competent and confident boy of twenty- 
four, always ready for the newer, bigger thing, 
promptly accepted it. 

In two weeks after the cable offer and an- 
swer, a feverish fortnight devoted to a rapid 
clearing up of things in Australia, Hoover was 
on his way to London, to report personally to 
his employers about their own affairs as well 
as to get some information about the new un- 
dertaking. He wanted to find out before he 
got to China, if he could, something of what 
would be expected of a Director-General of 
Mines of the Chinese Empire. Perhaps he had 
in mind the possible necessity of "getting up" 

81 



HERBERT HOOVER 

a little special knowledge about Chinese mines 
and mining ways before he tackled his new 
job, just as he had got up enough physiology 
in thirty-six hours to help get him into Stan- 
ford University, and enough typewriting in a 
week-end to fit him for entrance into Louis 
Janin's office in San Francisco. 

However, after two weeks in the metropolis, 
eight or nine days on the Atlantic, two or three 
in New York, and five on the transcontinental 
trains, he found himself again in California and 
ready to make from there his second start to 
the far-away lands from which his loudest 
calls seemed to come — ready, that is, except for 
one thing. He was now, let us remember, at 
this beginning of the year 1899, not yet twenty- 
five years old, not that by half a year, indeed, 
and a half year could mean, as we have already 
seen, a great deal in his life. And he was a 
boy-man with a record already behind him of 
achievement and a position already in his hands 
of much responsibility and large salary. So 
he declared that the time had now come for the 
carrying out of the decision he had made in his 
college days of four years before. It was the 

82 



IN CHINA 

little matter, you will promptly guess, and 
guess correctly, of marrying the girl of the 
geology department. He arrived in San Fran- 
cisco the first of February, 1899. He spent 
the next few days in Monterey, "the old Pacific 
capital" of Stevenson's charming sketch, but of 
chief interest to Hoover as the place where Lou 
Henry — that was her name — lived. And here 
they were married at noon of Friday, February 
10. At two o'clock they left for San Fran- 
cisco, and at noon the next day sailed for the 
empire of China. 

Into the sleepy, half Mexican, historic town 
on the curving sands of the shores of the blue 
Bay of Monterey this swift, breathlessly swift, 
boy engineer had come from distant Australia, 
by way of Marseilles and London, had clutched 
up the beautiful daughter of the respected town 
banker, and was now carrying her off to dis- 
tant China, where she was to live in all the 
state becoming the wife of the Director- Gen- 
eral of Mines of the Celestial Empire. It was 
a bit too much for the old Pacific capital, which 
did not know — for it was not told — that the 
sudden appearance of the meteor bridegroom 

83 



HERBERT HOOVER 

had been preceded by many astronomical 
warnings in the way of electric messages that 
came to the prospective bride from Australia 
and London and New York. Anyway, it 
wasn't quite fair to the town, which tries to 
maintain old Mexican traditions, that go back 
to Spain, of a full assortment of festivities in- 
cident to any proper marrying. But Monterey 
has long been reconciled to this missed oppor- 
tunity, and now reveals a just pride as the 
home town of the woman who has played such 
an active role in the career of her distinguished 
husband. 

The hurrying couple, at least, had time for 
breath-taking — and honeymoon — when once on 
board ship. For it is a month's voyaging from 
San Francisco to China — or, at least, was then. 
They had for seat-mates at table Frederick 
Palmer, the war correspondent, and wife, which 
was the beginning of a friendship that still en- 
dures. And there were for other interesting 
companions a secretary of our legation at 
Pekin and his wife, and a missionary pair who 
may or may not have survived the Boxer 
massacres. 

84 



IN CHINA 

The work in China was at first rather simple. 
Mines, of course, there were and had been for 
uncounted centuries. But what was needed 
by the new Department was some sort of 
survey of the mineral resources and mining 
possibilities of the Empire, and a tentative 
framing of a code of mining laws, so that the 
new development of the mines of the country 
which Chang hoped to initiate could be carried 
on to best advantage, and in such a way that 
private enterprise could participate in it. For 
centuries the mines had been Crown property 
and the ruler had simply let them out directly, 
or through the viceroys, for either a stipulated 
annual rental or for as much "squeeze" as could 
be wrung from the lessees in any of several 
various ways. And there had to be some rental 
or "squeeze" for each of the many officials that 
could get within arm's length of the mining 
business. The tenure of the use of the mines 
by the lessees was usually simply the period of 
the continued satisfaction of the lessor. 

All this had not made for any extensive new 
opening up of the country's mineral resources, 
or for the scientific development of the mines 

85 



HERBERT HOOVER 

already long known. One could not afford to 
put much capital into prospecting or into mod- 
ernizing the mining methods when each im- 
provement simply meant either more rent or 
"squeeze," or the giving up of the mine. So 
the ores were mined and the metals extracted 
from them by the miners according to the 
methods of their ancestors as far back as his- 
tory or tradition went, and it was all done under 
a set of mining laws as primitive as the mining 
methods themselves. There were enormous 
possibilities of improvement. It would have 
been hard for any mining engineer to do any- 
thing at all to the situation without improving 
it. For Hoover, with his technical education 
in metallurgical processes, his experience in 
handling various and difficult mining situa- 
tions, and his genius for organizing and syste- 
matizing, the opportunity was simply unique. 
He plunged into the work of examining and 
planning and codifying with the zest of a nat- 
uralist in an unexplored jungle. In the day 
time he made his examination; at nights he 
studied the mining laws of all time and all the 
world. 

86 



IN CHINA 

He built up a staff as rapidly as it could be 
put together and correlated with the tasks be- 
fore it. He had sent in advance for two or 
three men he had worked with in America and 
for some of his most able and dependable as- 
sociates in West Australia, including Agnew, 
a mill expert, and Newbery, a metallurgist, 
son of a famous geologist, both of them de- 
voted to "the Chief." That was Hoover's 
sobriquet among his early mining associates; 
just as it was later among the members of his 
successive great war-time organizations. He 
has just naturally — not artificially — always 
been "the Chief" among his co-workers and 
associates. 

His Caucasian staff of perhaps a dozen was 
greatly overshadowed in number by his Chi- 
nese staff, composed chiefly of semitechnical 
assistants, draftsmen, surveyors' assistants, 
interpreters, etc. A few of the Chinese helpers 
had had foreign training; there was one from 
Yale, for example, and another from Rose 
Polytechnic ; the latter so devoted to American 
baseball that he was greatly disappointed in the 
new Director of Mines when he found he was 

87 



HERBERT HOOVER 

not a baseball player. But he thought better 
of him when he learned that he had at least 
managed his college team. The staff had its 
headquarters in Tientsin, where were also the 
principal laboratories for the mineralogists, as- 
say ers, and chemists. Some of the men gave 
their time to the technical work, and others 
were engaged in collecting and correlating 
everything that had been published in the for- 
eign languages about the geology and mines' 
of China, while Chinese scholars hunted down 
and translated into English all that had been 
printed in Chinese literature. But the Di- 
rector and most of his immediate experienced 
assistants were chiefly occupied with the ex- 
ploring expeditions into the interior and the 
examination of the old mines and new pros- 
pects. Especially did some immediate atten- 
tion have to be given to the mines already be- 
ing actually worked, for the Minister let it be 
known that he expected the new Director to 
pay the way of the Department as soon as pos- 
sible from the increased proceeds of the mines 
which were to arise from the magic touch of the 
foreign experts. 

88 



IN CHINA 

These expeditions were elaborate affairs, 
contrasting strangely with Hoover's earlier ex- 
periences in America and Australia. The 
Chinese major-domo in charge insisted that 
the make-up and appearance of the outfit 
should reflect the high estate of the Director 
of Mines, so that every movement involved the 
organization of a veritable caravan of ponies, 
mules, carts, men on foot, and sedan chairs car- 
ried by coolies. These chairs were for the Di- 
rector and his wife, who, however, would not 
use them, preferring saddle horses. But the 
proud manager of the expedition insisted that 
they be carried along, empty, to show the ad- 
miring populace that even if the strange for- 
eign potentates amazingly preferred to ride 
in a rather common way on horseback they 
could at least afford to have sedan chairs. Im- 
agine a prospecting outfit in the California 
Sierra or the West Australian bush with se- 
dan chairs! And there were cooks and valets 
and cot beds and folding chairs and mosquito 
bed curtains and charcoal stoves and an array 
of pans and pots like Oscar's in the Waldorf 
kitchens, and often a cavalry guard of twenty- 

89 



HERBERT HOOVER 

five or fifty men, superfluous but insistent and 
always hungry. Whether the expedition found 
any mines or not it was at least an impressive 
object lesson to the Celestial myriads that the 
new Imperial Department of Mines knew how 
to hunt for them in proper style. When Mrs. 
Hoover once remonstrated with one of the in- 
terpreters of the cavalcade about such an un- 
necessary outfit, the answer was: "Mr. Hoover 
is such expensive man to my country we 
cannot afford to let him die for want of small 
things." 

A similar state had to be lived up to in the 
Director's home in Tientsin. The house was a 
large, four-square, wide-veranded affair, in 
which a dozen to fifteen servants, care- 
fully distinguished as "No. 1 Boy," "No. 2 
Boy" and so on down the line, waited, accord- 
ing to their own immemorial traditions, on the 
Director and his wife. These servants had 
curious ways, and a curious language in the 
odd pidgin English that enabled the door boy 
to announce that "the number one topside for- 
eign devil joss man have makee come," when 
the English Bishop called, and the table boy 

90 



IN CHINA 

to announce a dish of duckling as "one piecee 
duck pups," or of chicken as "one piecee 
looster." The social scale among the few for- 
eign residents was very precisely defined, and 
the social life of the foreign colony highly con- 
ventionalized, so that the unassuming, practi- 
cal-minded young engineer of the high title and 
social position who was terribly bored — as he 
is today — by social rigmarole, and who was 
thought rather queer by the conventional- 
minded small diplomats and miscellaneous for- 
eign residents because, as one of them put it, 
"he always seems to be thinking," was glad to 
be out of all this as much as possible and on 
the road, even if it had to be with the ludicrous 
caravan of state. Sometimes even all the at- 
tempted comfort and superfluous luxury of 
the caravan did not prevent the expedition from 
having serious hardships and running into real 
danger. An expedition across the great Gobi 
desert that lasted for thirty-nine days was suc- 
cessfully accomplished only after hard battling 
with heat, hunger and thirst, and even with hos- 
tile natives. 

Some of the results expected from this im- 
91 



HERBERT HOOVER 

ported miner were rather startling. For in- 
stance, age-long rumor had it that the Emper- 
or's hunting park at Jehol overlay immensely 
valuable gold deposits. The Minister inti- 
mated to the Director that he would like to 
know the real facts about this as soon as pos- 
sible. As the park lay in a little-explored 
region of southern Manchuria and was a place 
of much historical as well as geological interest, 
the Director decided to make a personal exami- 
nation of it. After the expedition had been out 
several days, he was told that on the next they 
would come in sight of the Great Royal Park. 
Accordingly on the next day the guide of the 
caravan took him, with one or two of the Cau- 
casian members of his staff and an interpreter, 
off from the road the grand retinue was fol- 
lowing, and by winding paths up to a hill top 
which commanded a superb prospect. 

"There," said the interpreter, with a wave of 
his hand toward the stretching prospect of 
beautiful valleys, low broad hills and mountain 
side, "there is the Hunting Park of Jehol." 
Then, turning complacently to the Director of 
Mines, he asked, simply: "Is there gold be- 

92 



IN CHINA 

neath it?" And interpreter and guide, and 
later, even more important officials, were stupe- 
fied to learn that the wonderful imported man 
who knew all about gold could not say offhand, 
from his vantage point, miles away, whether 
there was gold under the Park or not. And, 
more disturbing still, that he probably could 
not say anything about it at all without actu- 
ally tramping over the sacred soil and perhaps 
sacrilegiously digging into it. 

Such occasionally necessary confessions of 
incompetence made a little trouble, but only a 
little. However much the under men lacked 
knowledge about minerals and mines and how 
to find out about them, the head of the Depart- 
ment, Chang, knew enough to know that if his 
young Director confessed inability to meet cer- 
tain demands it was because there was more 
wrong with the demands than with the engin- 
eer. But the real fly in the ointment soon be- 
gan to make itself visible. It was not a dis- 
illusionment on the part of the Chinese officials 
in connection with their foreign expert, but a I 
disillusionment on his part in regard to his real ! 
position and opportunities for accomplishing 

93 



HERBERT HOOVER 

something for China. He began more and 
more clearly to realize that he could investigate 
and advise as much as he liked but that he could 
really do, in his understanding of doing, com- 
paratively little. The modern West cannot 
make over the immemorial East in a day or 
even a year. 

Gradually the young engineer came to real- 
ize that while his examinations and reports 
were all very welcome, and whatever he could 
suggest for improvement in technical detail, 
resulting in immediate greater output of the 
mines already working, was gladly accepted, 
there was no willingness to accept advice lead- 
ing to changes in administrative and general 
organization matters. And to the modern en- 
gineer efficiency in these matters is as much a 
part of successful mining as skilled digging 
and good metallurgy. Suggestions looking to- 
ward getting more work out of the men, or cut- 
ting down the payrolls by removing the thirty 
per cent of the names on them that seemed to 
have no bodily attachments, were frowned on. 
These things interfered with "squeeze," and 
"squeeze" was a traditional part of Chinese 

94 



IN CHINA 

mining. Foreign advisors and helpers were 
all very well when they found gold, but not so 
well when they found graft. A crisis was vis- 
ible in the offing. But this particular crisis 
did not arrive, for another larger and more 
serious one came more swiftly on and arrived 
almost unheralded. It was the Boxer Upris- 
ing. 

The outbreak found Hoover at Tientsin 
having but recently returned from Pekin 
with Mrs. Hoover, and both just recovering 
from severe attacks of influenza. If oppor- 
tunity for thorough organizing of the mines of 
China had failed him he now had full scope for 
organizing a military defense of his home and 
wife and his many employees, foreign and nat- 
ive, for Tientsin, for a month, was the scene of 
hot fighting. It was a besieged household in 
a beleaguered city. Hoover could have got- 
ten out with his wife and few Caucasian as- 
sistants at the beginning of the trouble, but he 
would not desert his few hundred Chinese help- 
ers and their families — and his wife would not 
desert him. So they staid on together through 
all the rifle and shell fire and conflagrations 

95 



HERBERT HOOVER 

of the Tientsin siege, building and defending 
barricades of rice and sugar sacks, organizing 
food and water supplies, and cheerfully "car- 
rying on" in the face of certain death, and 
worse, if the outnumbering fanatic Boxers 
happened to win. 

But there were occasional lighter incidents 
amid the many grave ones of the fighting 
weeks. Mrs. Hoover tells one, her favorite 
story of those days, in something like the fol- 
lowing words. "We had a cow, famous and in- 
fluential in the community, which cow was the 
mother of a promising calf. One day the cow 
was stolen and Mr. Hoover set out to find her. 
With three or four friends and half a dozen 
attendant Chinese boys he took out the tiny 
calf one night and by the light of a lantern 
led the little orphan, bleating for its mother, 
about the streets of the town. Finally, as 
they passed in front of the barracks of the Ger- 
man contingent of the international defending 
army, there came, from within, an answering 
moo, and Mr. Hoover, addressing the sentry, 
demanded his cow. The sentry made no move 
to comply, but, summoning all his Worterbuch 

96 



IN CHINA 

English, countered with the inquiry: 'Is that 
the calf of the cow inside?' Upon receiving 
an affirmative reply to his Ollendorff question, 
he calmly declared, 'Also, then, calf outside 
must join itself to cow inside.' And there- 
upon by aid of a suggestive manipulation of 
his bayonet, he confiscated the calf, and sent 
Mr. Hoover home empty-handed." 

As one of the precursors of the Boxer affair 
Chang Yen Mow got into the bad graces of 
the government, gave up his position and was 
forced to flee from Pekin and take refuge in 
Tientsin. Even here he was dragged out of 
his palace and stood up before a firing squad, 
and escaped with his life only through vigorous 
interference by his Director of Mines. Be- 
cause he thopght that he might save from 
probable confiscation a valuable coal mining 
property at Tongshan about eighty miles from 
Tientsin, he desired to transfer this property 
outright to Hoover's name for the protection 
of the foreign title. Hoover refused this, but 
did undertake to go to Europe on a contract 
with Chang to enlist the aid of the Belgian and 
British bondholders of the Company to pro- 

97 



HERBERT HOOVER 

tect the property. These men rescued and re- 
organized the Company, dispatched their own 
financial agents to China, and appointed 
Hoover chief engineer to superintend the real 
development of the great property. 

The wily old Celestial finding, after all, 
that China was not to be partitioned by the 
powers that had defended it against the Box- 
ers, and that private property was not to be 
confiscated, now proposed to break his contract 
so eagerly made. And there seemed to be no 
hope that the curious course of Chinese law 
would ever compel him to recognize his previ- 
ous agreements. But there was something in 
the persistent, indomitable pressure of the 
quiet but firm young Belgian agent, named 
de Wouters, who had come back with Hoover, 
and of the young American, which did finally 
compel the old Chinaman, after much trouble 
and delay, to live up to his contract. 

Years later the situation, with kaleidoscopic 
picturesqueness, took on another hue, and 
Hoover found himself defending Chang's in- 
terests from the overzealous attempts of some 
of the foreign owners to get more out of the 

98 






IN CHINA 

mines than was their fair share. In making the 
original contracts it had been agreed to have 
a Chinese board with a Chinese chairman, as 
well as a foreign board. This led to much dif- 
ficulty and some of the Europeans declared 
that the young American had been much at 
fault in consenting to an arrangement which 
left so much share in the control to the Chinese, 
and they repudiated this arrangement. Hoover 
and de Wouters had a long hard struggle in 
getting justice for old Chang, but just as their 
persistence had earlier held Chang up to his 
agreements for the sake of the European own- 
ers of the undertaking, so now, directed in 
the opposite direction, it succeeded in getting 
justice for Chang and his Chinese group. 

The affair brought him into business rela- 
tions with another Belgian named Emile 
Francqui, of keen mind and great personal 
force, who, with de Wouters, were, strangely 
enough, later to be chief and first assistant 
executives, respectively, of the Great Belgian 
Comite National during the long hard days 
of the German Occupation. It was with these 
men among all the Belgians that Hoover was 

99 



HERBERT HOOVER 

to have most to do in connection with his work 
as initiator and director of the Commission for 
Relief in Belgium. 

But we are now, in the story of Herbert 
Hoover, only in the year 1900, and the Bel- 
gian Relief did not begin until 1914. And 
Hoover was still to have many experiences as 
engineer and man of affairs, before he was to 
meet his Belgian acquaintances again under 
the dramatic conditions produced by the World 
War. 

He had now his opportunity really to do 
something in China in line with his own ideas 
of doing things in connection with mines, and 
not with those of Chinese mining tradition. As 
consulting engineer, and later general manager 
of the "Chinese Engineering and Mining Com- 
pany" he attacked the job of making Chang's 
great Tongshan coal properties a going con- 
cern. This job involved building railways, 
handling a fleet of ocean-going steamers, de- 
veloping large cement works, and superintend- 
ing altogether the work of about 20,000 em- 
ployees. A special one among the undertak- 
ings of the twelve months or more given to this 

100 



IN CHINA 

enterprise was the building of Ching Wang 
Tow harbor to give his coal a proper sea out- 
let. Altogether it was a "mining" job of all 
the variety and hugeness of extent that the 
twenty-seven-year-old miner and organizer 
found most to his liking. And despite ob- 
stacles and complications due both to his Chi- 
nese and Caucasian company associates he did 
it successfully, enjoyed it immensely, and got 
from it much education and experience. But 
he was ready after about a year of it to turn 
his attention to the rest of the world. 



CHAPTER VI 

LONDON AND THE REST OF THE WORLD 

In 1902, now twenty-eight years old, Her- 
bert Hoover returned to London as a jun- 
ior partner in the great English firm with which 
he had been earlier associated as its star field 
man in West Australia. But, though with 
an actual headquarters office in London, he 
was mostly anywhere else in the world but 
there. He was still the firm's chief engineer 
and principal field expert and upon him fell 
much of the responsibility of the firm's actual 
mining operations in the field as distinguished 
from its financial operations in the "city." He 
probably spent little more than a tenth of his 
time in London, and this was also true in his 
later career when he had given up his connec- 
tion with the firm and was wholly "on his own" 
as independent consulting engineer and mine- 
organizer. And this explains what has often 
puzzled many of the people who came to know 
him and his household in London. He and 

102 



LONDON AND THE REST OF THE WORLD 

it were so little "English." His home in Lon- 
don seemed always to be a bit of transplanted 
America, and, in particular, a bit of trans- 
planted California. As a matter of fact, in 
all his years of London connections there was 
hardly one that did not see him and his family 
in America including an inevitable stay in 
California. He maintained offices in New 
^Tork and San Francisco and had no slightest 
temptation, much less desire, ever to become 
an expatriate. 

But this is getting ahead of the story. There 
is one outstanding happening in his London 
experience that insistently demands telling. 
It is the happening that meant for him the 
greatest setback in his otherwise almost mo- 
notonously successful career. And yet, al- 
though this happening meant temporary finan- 
cial ruin for him, it was, in its way, only an- 
other success, a success of revealing signifi- 
cance to those who would like to know the real 
man that Herbert Hoover is. 

After one of his returns to London, and in 
the absence of the head of the firm in China, he 
discovered a defalcation of staggering pro- 

103 



HERBERT HO'OVER 

portions. A man connected with the firm had 
lost in speculation over a million dollars ob- 
tained from friends and clients of the firm, 
by the issuance and sale of false stock. Tech- 
nically the operations of the defaulter were 
of such a character that the firm could not be 
held legally liable. But the junior partner 
swept the technicalities aside with a single 
gesture. He announced that they would make 
good all of the obligations incurred by the 
defaulter. This meant the immediate loss of 
his own personal fortune, and it meant a seri- 
ous difference of opinion with the absent head 
of the firm, whose frantic cables came, how- 
ever, too late to overrule the decision of the 
junior partner. 

There ensued a long bitter struggle, most 
of it falling on the junior partner with the 
Quaker conscience, to make good the losses 
without actually putting the firm out of busi- 
ness. For going on with the business was es- 
sential to the making good. It was a gruelling 
four years' struggle, but with success at the end 
of it. And then the American engineer, now 
grown forever out of youth to the man who had 

104 



LONDON AND THE REST OF THE WORLD 

experienced the down as well as the up in life, 
gave up his connection with the firm and 
launched on that career of independent and 
self-responsible activity which has been his 
ever since. This was in 1908. Hoover was 
now thirty-four years old and probably the 
leading consulting mining engineer in the 
world. 

His work soon took him back to Australia, 
the land of his first notable success, but this 
time into South Australia instead of West 
Australia. Here he took personal charge of 
a large constructive undertaking in connec- 
tion with the rehabilitation of the famous 
Broken Hill Mines. These mines were in the 
inhospitable wastes of the Great Stony Desert, 
four or five hundred miles north of Adelaide, 
the port city. The living and working condi- 
tions in the desert were a little worse than aw- 
ful, but by his technical and organizing abil- 
ity he brought to life the two or three aban- 
doned mines which constituted the Broken 
Hills properties, and, adding to them some 
adjoining lower grade mines, converted the 
whole group from a state of great but un- 

105 



HERBERT HOOVER 

realized possibilities into one of highly profit- 
able actualities. An important factor in this 
achievement was his origination and success- 
ful development of a process for extracting the 
zinc from ores that had already been treated 
for the other metals and then cast aside as 
worthless residues. There were fourteen mil- 
lion tons of these residues on the Broken Hills 
dumps and from them he derived large returns 
for the company that he had organized to 
purchase the property. 

He also introduced new metallurgical pro- 
cesses for the profitable handling of the low- 
grade sulphide ores that constituted most of 
the mineral body of the mines. Indeed, this 
work in South Australia did much to help 
prove to him what has long been one of his 
cardinal beliefs, namely, that the safe backbone 
of mining lies in the handling of large bodies of 
low-grade ores. When such great ore-bodies 
are given the benefit of proper metallurgical 
processes and large organizing and intelligent 
building up of exterior plants, mining leaves 
the realms of speculation and becomes a cer- 
tain and stable business operation. 

106 



LONDON AND THE REST OF THE WORLD 

All this successful work in South Australia 
occupied but seven months. Back in London 
again he gathered about him a remarkable 
staff of skilled young mining engineers 5 
mostly Americans. There were thirty-five or 
forty of them, indeed, not on salary or fixed 
appointment, but men eager to attach them- 
selves to him for the sake of working with 
him or for him in connection with the 
ever-increasing number of his large enter- 
prises in the way of reorganization and 
rehabilitation of mines scattered all over 
the world. He became the managing di- 
rector or chief consulting engineer of a score 
of mining companies, and the simple associa- 
tion of his name with a mining enterprise gave 
investors and other engineers a perfect con- 
fidence in its success and its honest handling. 

Two of his largest undertakings were in 
Russia, one at Kyshtim, in the Urals, the other 
at Irtish on the Siberian plains near Man- 
churia. The Kyshtim property was a great 
but run-down historic establishment, on an es- 
tate of an area almost equal to that of all Bel- 
gium. One hundred and seventy thousand 

107 



HERBERT HOOVER 

people lived on the estate, all dependent on the 
mining establishment for their support. The 
ores were of iron and copper, but the mines 
were so far from anywhere that not only did 
these ores have to be smelted at the mine 
mouths, but factories had to be erected to 
manufacture the metal into products capable 
of compact transportation. When Hoover 
took over the bankrupt properties he found 
himself not only with mining and manufactur- 
ing problems to solve, but with what was prac- 
tically a relief problem to face. For the under- 
paid workmen and their unfortunate families 
were in a state of great misery. He suc- 
ceeded not only in modernizing and rehabili- 
tating the material part of the great establish- 
ment, but at the same time in rescuing and re- 
vivifying a suffering laboring population of 
helpless Russians. 

The Irtish properties were near the Man- 
churian border, a thousand miles up the Irtish 
River from Omsk, a mere remote bleak spot 
on the wild, bare Siberian steppes. But at this 
spot lay extensive deposits of zinc, iron, lead, 
copper and coal, all together. He had first of 

108 



LONDON AND THE REST OF THE WORLD 

all to build 350 miles of railroad to make the 
spot at all accessible. And the actual "min- 
ing" operations included everything from dig- 
ging out and smelting the ores to manufactur- 
ing all sorts of things from metal door-knobs 
to steel rails and even steamboats to ply on the 
Irtish River. He put a large sum of English, 
Canadian and American money — including 
much of his own — into the work of building up 
a great establishment which was just on a pay- 
ing basis when the war broke out. It is all now 
in the hands of the Bolsheviki, with a most 
dubious outlook for the recovery of any of the 
money put into it. 

Other large operations under his direction 
were in Colorado, Mexico, Korea, the Malay 
Straits Settlement, South Africa, and India 
(Burma) . The Burma undertaking has been, 
in its outcome at least, and, indeed, in many 
other respects, Hoover's greatest victory in 
mining engineering and organization. It is 
today the greatest silver-lead mine in the 
world, although it started from as near to noth- 
ing as a mine could be and yet be called a 
mine. It took him and his associates five years 

109 



HERBERT HOOVER 

to transform some deserted works in the heart 
of a jungle into the foremost producer of its 
kind in all the world. This mine is far away 
in the north of Burma, almost on the Chinese 
border. They had first to build eighty miles 
of railroad through the jungle and over two 
ranges of mountains, a sufficient feat of en- 
gineering in itself, and then to create and or- 
ganize at the end of this line everything per- 
taining to a great mining plant. Thirty thou- 
sand men were employed in establishing the 
mine. 

Altogether Hoover and his associates had in 
their employment, in the various mining under- 
takings under way in 1914, about 175,000 men, 
and the annual mineral output of the mines 
being handled by them was worth as much as 
the total annual output of all the mines in 
California. And practically all of these suc- 
cessful mines had been made out of unsuccess- 
ful ones. For Hoover really developed a new 
profession in connection with mining; a pro- 
fession of making good mines out of bad ones, 
of making bankrupt mining concerns solvent, 
not by manipulation on the stock exchange but 

110 



LONDON AND THE REST OF THE WORLD 

by work in the earth, in the mills, in the mine 
offices. He works with materials, not pieces of 
paper. It takes him from three to five years 
to bring a dead mine to life; the mine must 
have mineral in it, to be sure, to start with, but 
he does all the rest. That little matter of hav- 
ing mineral in it is the whole thing, you may 
think. But if you do, you must think again. 
The history of mining is more a history of how 
mines with mineral in them have not succeeded 
in becoming mines where the mineral could be 
profitably got out of them, than of how such 
mines have succeeded. A successful mine is 
infinitely more than a hole in the ground with 
mineral at its bottom. It is railroads and 
steamers, mills, housing for men, men them- 
selves, organization, system, skill, brains, all- 
around human capacity. Herbert Hoover is 
a great miner because he is — I say it bluntly 
and not from any blind hero-worship — a great 
man. 

If he is, he can do more than mine greatly; 
he can do other things greatly. Well, he can, 
and he has done them. We come to that part 
of his story now, the part that begins when 

111 



HERBERT HOOVER 

the World War began, when the world saw 
with amazement that grew into ever greater 
amazement an unknown miner, that is, un- 
known except to other miners, calmly do 
things that only great men can do. But we 
who know now the story of the boy and the 
man of the years before the war are not so 
much amazed. We know that he is the kind 
of man, who had had the kind of experience, 
the kind of world education, who with oppor- 
tunity can do things the world calls great and 
be the great man. But just for a few min- 
utes before we begin with August, 1914, the 
time when Herbert Hoover began a new chap- 
ter in his work because the world had begun 
a new epoch in its history, let us have a glimpse 
of this man outside of his mines and his of- 
fices. Let us see him in his home, with his 
family, with his books if he has any, and with 
his friends of whom he has many. 

His two children, Herbert and Allan, were 
born in 1903 and 1907 respectively. Living 
first in apartments, the Hoovers felt that they 
and the boys and the dog Rags needed more 
room, or perhaps, better, different kind of 

112 



LONDON AND THE REST OF THE WORLD 

room, room for an energetic family of Ameri- 
cans to grow up in Western American fashion, 
as far as this could be compassed in London. , 
And so they found, farther west, in a short 
street just off Kensington High Street and 
close to Kensington Gardens, a roomy old 
house with a garden with real trees in it and 
some grass and flower-beds. It had been built 
long before by somebody who liked room, and 
then rebuilt, or at least made over and added 
to, by Montin Conway, the Alpinist and au- 
thor. For generations it had been called "The 
Red House," a name that became in the suc- 
ceeding years more and more widely known 
to Americans living in, coming to, or passing 
through London, for it became a well-known 
house of American foregathering. 

I knew it first in 1912 when I was doing some 
work in the British Museum Library. The 
bedroom to which my wife and I were shown 
was inhabited already by a happy and very 
vocal family of little Javanese seed birds and 
green parrakeets, a part of the boys' menag- 
erie which had to find refuge from the other 
animals already housed in their adjoining 

113 



HERBERT HOOVER 

rooms. Out in the garden there were pigeons 
fluttering in and out of a cote, and hens sol- 
emnly inspecting the newly-seeded flower-beds. 
A big silver Persian cat, and a smaller yellow 
Siamese one regularly attended breakfasts, and 
Rags irregularly attended everything. The 
cats were Mr. Hoover's favorites. He liked to 
have one on his lap as he talked. 

There were bookshelves in all of the rooms, 
and I noted that the owner, however many the 
guests had been, or long the evening, never 
went up to bed without a book in his 
hand. I came later to know how fixed this 
night-reading habit had become, for in the 
Belgian relief years when we had frequently 
to cross the perilous North Sea together on 
our way from Thames-mouth to Holland or 
back in one of the little Dutch boats which used 
to run across twice a week until most of the 
boats had been blown up by floating mines, 
Hoover used always to fix an electric pocket 
lamp or a stub of a candle to the edge of 
his bunk and read for a while after turn- 
ing in. He has had little time for read- 
ing in daytime, but yet he has read enorm- 
ia 



LONDON AND THE REST OF THE WORLD 

ously. It is this night-reading that explains it. 
The shelves in "The Red House" contained 
many books about geology and mining and 
metallurgy. But they contained many others 
as well. Especially were they burdened with 
books on economics and political science. And 
they bore lighter loads of stories. Sherlock 
Holmes was there in eootenso. The books on 
civics and economics and theories of finance 
were well thumbed and some of them margined 
with roughly penciled notes. I should say 
they had been studied. A frequent evening 
visitor, who came by preference when there 
had been no guests at dinner, was a well- 
known brilliant student of finance and eco- 
nomics, formerly editor of the best-known 
English financial weekly and now editor 
of a very liberal, not to say radical, 
weekly of his own. He and Hoover held 
long disquisition together, each having clear- 
cut ideas of his own and glad to try them out 
on the keen intelligence of the other. As a 
mere biologist, whose little knowledge was 
more of the domestic economy of the four and 
six-footed inhabitants of earth than of the so- 

115 



HERBERT HOOVER 

cial science and politics of the bipedal lords of 
creation, my role was chiefly that of fascinated 
listener. 

Although he likes books and even likes writ- 
ing, Hoover makes no claims to authorship 
himself. Nevertheless he has found time to 
put something of his knowledge, based on first- 
hand experience of the fundamentals and de- 
tails of mining geology, and mining methods 
and organization, into a book which, under the 
title of Principles of Mining, has been a well- 
known text for students of mining engineer- 
ing since its appearance in 1909. The book is 
a condensation of a course of lectures given by 
the author partly in Stanford and partly in 
Columbia University. Although it contains an 
unusual amount of original matter and old 
knowledge originally treated for the kind of 
book it professes to be, namely a compact man- 
ual of approved mining practice, the author's 
preface is a model of modest appraisement of 
his work. One of its paragraphs simply de- 
mands quotation: 

"The bulk of the material presented [in this 
116 



LONDON AND THE REST OF THE WORLD 

book] is the common heritage of the pro- 
fession, and if any may think there is insuf- 
ficient reference to previous writers, let him 
endeavor to find to whom the origin of our 
methods should be credited. The science 
has grown by small contributions of experi- 
ence since, or before, those unnamed Egyp- 
tian engineers, whose works prove their 
knowledge of many fundamentals of mine 
engineering six thousand eight hundred years 
ago. If I have contributed one sentence 
to the accumulated knowledge of a thousand 
generations of engineers or have thrown one 
new ray of light on the work, I shall have done 
my share." 

In the latter chapters of the book Hoover, 
having devoted the earlier chapters to technical 
methods, treats of the administrative and finan- 
cial phases of mining. The last chapter is de- 
voted to the "character, training, and obliga- 
tions of the mining engineering profession" in 
which he sets up a standard of professional 
ethics for the engineer of the very highest de- 
gree and reveals clearly his own genuinely phil- 
anthropic attitude toward his fellow men. In 
the discussion of mining administration there 

117 



HERBERT HOOVER 

is a concise but illuminating treatment of the 
subject of labor unions. After discussing con- 
tract work and bonus systems he says : 

"There is another phase of the labor question 
which must be considered, and that is the gen- 
eral relations of employer and employed. As 
corporations have grown, so likewise have the 
labor unions. In general, they are normal and 
proper antidotes for unlimited capitalistic or- 
ganization. 

"Labor unions usually pass through two 
phases. First, the inertia of the unorganized 
labor is too often stirred only by demagogic 
means. After organization through these and 
other agencies, the lack of balance in the leaders 
often makes for injustice in demands, and for 
violence to obtain them and disregard of agree- 
ments entered upon. As time goes on, men be- 
come educated in regard to the rights of their 
employers and to the reflection of these rights 
in ultimate benefit to labor itself. Then the 
men, as well as the intelligent employer, en- 
deavor to safeguard both interests. When this 
stage arrives, violence disappears in favor of 
negotiation on economic principles, and the 
unions achieve their greatest real gains. Given 
a union with leaders who can control the mem- 
bers, and who are disposed to approach differ- 

118 



LONDON AND THE REST OF THE WORLD 

ences in a business spirit, there are few sounder 
positions for the employer, for agreements 
honorably carried out dismiss the constant 
harassments of possible strikes. Such unions 
exist in dozens of trades in this country, and 
they are entitled to greater recognition. The 
time when the employer could ride roughshod 
over his labor is disappearing with the doctrine 
of laissez faire on which it was founded. The 
sooner the fact is recognized, the better for the 
employer. The sooner some miners' unions 
develop from the first into the second stage, the 
more speedily will their organizations secure 
general respect and influence. 

"The crying need of labor unions, and of 
some employers as well, is education on a fun- 
damental of economics too long disregarded 
by all classes and especially by the academic 
economist. When the latter abandon the 
theory that wages are the result of supply and 
demand, and recognize that in these days of in- 
ternational flow of labor, commodities and capi- 
tal, the real controlling factor in wages is ef- 
ficiency, then such an educational campaign 
may become possible. Then will the employer 
and employee find a common ground on which 
each can benefit. There lives no engineer who 
has not seen insensate dispute as to wages 
where the real difficulty was inefficiency. No 

119 



HERBERT HOOVER 

administrator begrudges a division with his 
men of the increased profit arising from in- 
creased efficiency. But every administrator 
begrudges the wage level demanded by labor 
unions whose policy is decreased efficiency in 
the false belief that they are providing for 
more labor." 

Three years before publishing the Principles 
of Mining Hoover had collaborated with a 
a group of authors in the production of a book 
called Economics of Mining. And three years 
later, that is in 1912, he privately published, in 
sumptuous form, with scrupulously exact re- 
production of all of its many curious old wood- 
cuts, an English translation of Agricola's "De 
Re Metallica," the first great treatise on min- 
ing and metallurgy, originally published in 
Latin in 1556, only one hundred years after 
Gutenberg had printed his first book. "De Re 
Metallica" was the standard manual of mining 
and metallurgy for 180 years. Georgius Ag- 
ricola, the author, was really one Georg Bauer, 
a German of Saxony, who, following the cus- 
tom of his time used for pen-name the literal 
Latin equivalents of the words of his German 
name. 

120 



LONDON AND THE REST OF THE WORLD 

This translation, with its copious added 
notes of editorial commentary, was the joint 
work of Hoover and his wife — it was Mrs. 
Hoover, indeed, who began it — and occu- 
pied most of their spare time, especially their 
evenings — and sometimes nights! — and Sun- 
days, through nearly five years. They had 
been for some time collecting and delving in 
old books on China and the Far East and an- 
cient treatises on early mining and metallurgi- 
cal processes, and had accumulated an unusual 
collection of such books, ransacking the old 
bookshops of the world in their quest. In 
1902, Mrs. Hoover while looking up some 
geology in the British Museum Library, 
stumbled again on Agricola, which she had for- 
gotten since the days she was in Dr. Branner's 
laboratory. By invoking the services of one 
of their friends among the old book dealers 
the Hoovers soon owned a copy. Caught 
especially by the many curious and only half 
understandable pictures in it they began to 
translate bits from it here and there, espe- 
cially the explanations of the pictures, and 
in a little while they were lost. Nothing would 

121 



HERBERT HOOVER 

satisfy them short of making a complete trans- 
lation. It became an obsession; it was at first 
their recreation; then because it went very 
slowly it seemed likely to become their life avo- 
cation. 

They found an early German translation, 
which, however, helped them little. The trans- 
lator had apparently known little of mining 
and not too much of Latin. They went to 
Saxony, to the home of Agricola, hoping to 
get clues to the difficult things in the book by 
seeing the region and mines which had been 
under his eyes while writing it, and finding tra- 
ditions of the mining methods of his time. But 
it was as if a sponge had been passed over Ag- 
ricola and his days. Fire had swept over the 
towns he had known and all the ancient records 
were gone. The towns, rebuilt, and the mines 
of which he had written were there, but of him 
and of the ancient methods he wrote about 
there was hardly record or even tradition. 
They went to Freiberg, where has long existed 
the greatest German school of mines, the great- 
est mining school in the world, indeed, until 
the American schools were developed — prob- 

122 



LONDON AND THE REST OF THE WORLD 

ably the Germans would not admit even this 
qualification — and there they found no more to 
help them than in Agricola's own towns. In 
fact, the Freiberg professors seemed rather irri- 
tated by the advent of these searchers for an- 
cient mining history, for, as the savants ex- 
plained, the Freiberg methods and machines 
were all the most modern in the world; there 
were "no left-overs, no worn-out rubbish of 
those inefficient ages" around Germany's great 
school of mines. 

So the Hoovers were little rewarded by their 
pilgrimage to Germany for help in their at- 
tempt to resuscitate the Saxon Agricola. But 
they kept on mining in the big tome and finally, 
in the fifth year of their devoted spare-time 
labors they had before them a completed trans- 
lation. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE WAR ! THE MAN AND HIS FIRST SERVICE 

From the first day of the World War Her- 
bert Hoover has been a world figure. But 
much of what he has done and how he has done 
it is still only hazily known, for all the general 
public familiarity with his name as head of the 
Belgian relief work, American food adminis- 
trator, and, finally, director-general of the 
American and Allied relief work in Europe 
after the armistice. The public knows of him 
as the initiator and head of great organizations 
with heart in them, which were successfully 
managed on sound business principles. But 
it does not yet know the special character of 
Hoover's own personal participation in them, 
his original and resourceful contributions to 
their success, and the formidable obstacles 
which he had constantly to overcome in making 
this success possible. There was little that 

124s 



THE WAR: THE MAN 

"just happened" which contributed to this suc- 
cess; that which did just happen usually hap- 
pened wrong. Things came off because ideals 
were realized by practical method, decision, 
and driving power. I should like to be able to 
give the people of America a revealing 
glimpse, by outline and incident, of all this. 
And I should like, too, to be able to make clear 
the pure Americanism of this man ; to disclose 
the basis of belief in the soundness of the 
American heart and the practical possibilities 
of American democracy on which Hoover 
banked in determining his methods and daring 
his decisions. This belief was the easier to hold 
inasmuch as he has himself the soundness of 
character, the fundamental conviction of de- 
mocracy, and the true philanthropy that he 
attributes to the average American. He is his 
own American model. 

To call Herbert Hoover "English" as a 
cheap form of derogation, is to reveal a sur- 
prising paucity of invention in criticism. It 
is also unfair to about as American an Ameri- 
can as can be found. The translation of Agri- 
cola, an account of which closed our last chap- 

125 



HERBERT HOOVER 

ter, stretched over the long time that it did, not 
alone because Mr. and Mrs. Hoover could 
give only their spare hours to it, but also be- 
cause they could turn to it only while they 
were in London where the needed reference 
books were available. And their presence in 
London was so discontinuous that their trans- 
lating work was much more marked by inter- 
ruption than continuity. The constant returns 
to America where there were the New York 
and San Francisco offices to be looked after 
personally, and the many trips to the mining 
properties scattered over the world, limited 
Hoover's London days to a comparatively 
small number in each year. A London office 
was, to be sure, necessary between 1902 and 
1914 because of the advantage to a world miner 
of being close to affairs in the world's center 
of mining interests. And it was also neces- 
sary during Belgian relief days because of its 
unequaled accessibility, by persons or cable, 
from all the vital points in the complex inter- 
national structure of the relief organization. 
But in all this period of London connection, 
except in the Belgian relief period, Hoover 

126 



THE WAR: THE MAN 

was a familiar figure in mining circles in both 
New York and San Francisco, and although 
rarely able to cast his vote in America he main- 
tained a lively interest in American major gov- 
ernmental affairs. 

Hoover kept up, too, an active interest in 
the development of his alma mater, Stanford 
University, and especially in its geology and 
mining engineering department. In 1908 he 
was asked to join its faculty, and delivered a 
course of lectures on the principles of mining, 
which attracted such favorable comment that 
he repeated it shortly after in condensed form 
in Columbia University. On the basis of his 
experience as a university student of mining, 
and as a successful mine expert and operator, 
and as an employer of many other university 
graduates from universities and technical 
schools Hoover has formed definite conclu- 
sions as to what the distinctive character of 
professional university training for prospective 
mining engineers should be. It differs from a 
widely held view. 

He believes that the collegiate training 
should be less practical than fundamental. 

127 



HERBERT HOOVER 

The attempts, more common a decade ago than 
now perhaps, to convert schools of mining and 
departments of mining geology into shops and 
artificial mines, do not meet with favor in his 
eyes. Vocational, or professional, training in 
universities should leave most of the actual 
practice to be gained in actual experience and 
work after graduation. If the student is well- 
grounded in the fundamental science of min- 
ing and metallurgy, in geology and chemistry 
and physics and mechanics, he can quickly pick 
up the routine methods of practice. And he 
can do more. He can understand their raison 
d'etre, and he can modify and adapt them to 
the varying conditions under which they must 
be applied. He can, in addition, if he has any 
originality of mind at all, devise new methods, 
discover new facts of mining geology — the in- 
terior of the earth is by no means a read book 
as yet — and add not only his normal quota of 
additional wealth to the world, as a routine 
worker, but an increment of as yet unrealized 
possibilities, as an original investigator. In 
Hoover's own choice of assistants he has 
selected among men fresh from the universi- 

128 



THE WAR: THE MAN 

ties or technical schools those who have had 
thoroughly scientific, as contrasted with much 
technical, or so-called practical, training. 

His interest in universities and university 
administration and methods has always been 
intense. It has been reciprocated, if his honor- 
ary degrees from a dozen American colleges 
and universities can be assumed to be evidence 
of this. In 1912 he was made a trustee of Stan- 
ford and from the beginning of this trusteeship 
until now he has taken an active part in the uni- 
versity management, giving it the full benefit 
of his constructive service. His most recent ac- 
tivity in this connection has concerned itself 
with the needed increase and standardization 
of faculty salaries so that for each grade of 
faculty position there is assured at least a liv- 
ing minimum of salary. He was the originat- 
ing figure and principal donor of the Stanford 
Union, a general club-house for students and 
faculty, which adds materially to the comfort 
of home-wandering alumni and to the demo- 
cratic life of the University. In all the great 
University plant there was no place for a com- 
mon social meeting-ground for faculty, alumni, 

129 



HERBERT HOOVER 

and undergraduates. The Union provided it. 
If Stanford did much for Hoover in the days 
when he was one of its students, he has loyally- 
repaid his obligation. 

But all of these accounts of Hoover's vari- 
ous activities still leave unanswered many ques- 
tions concerning the more intimate personal 
characteristics of the man to whom the World 
War came in August, 1914, with its special call 
for service. He was then just forty years old, 
known to mining engineers everywhere and 
to the alumni and faculty and friends of Stan- 
ford University and to a limited group of busi- 
ness acquaintances and personal friends, but 
with a name then unknown to the world at 
large. Today no name is more widely known. 
Today millions of Europeans call him blessed; 
millions of Americans call him great. My 
own belief is that he and his work did more to 
save Europe from complete anarchy after the 
war than any other influence exerted on its 
people from the outside, and that without it 
there was no other sufficient influence either 
outside or inside which would have prevented 
this anarchy. 

130 



THE WAR: THE MAN 

Hoover's kinds of work are many, but his 
recreations are few. His chief form of exer- 
cise — if it is exercise — is motoring. He does 
not play outdoor games; no golf, tennis, but 
little walking. He has no system of kicking 
his legs about in bed or going through calis- 
thenics on rising. And yet he keeps in very 
good physical condition, at least he keeps in 
sufficiently good condition to do several men's 
days' work every day. He has a theory about 
this which he practices, and which he occasion- 
ally explains briefly to those who remonstrate 
with him about his neglect of exercise. "You 
have to take exercise," he says, "because you 
overeat. I do not overeat, and therefore I 
do not need exercise." It sounds very simple 
and conclusive; and it seems to work — in his 
case. 

He likes social life, but not society life. He 
enjoys company but he wants it to mean some- 
thing. He has little small talk but plenty of 
significant talk. He saves time by cutting out 
frills, both business and social. His directness 
of mental approach to any subject is expressed 
in his whole manner: his immediate attack in 

131 



HERBERT HOOVER 

conversation on the essence of the matter, his 
few words, his quick decisions. He can make 
these decisions quickly because he has clear 
policies to guide him. I recall being asked by 
him to come to breakfast one morning at Stan- 
ford after he had been elected trustee, to talk 
over the matter of faculty standards. His 
first question to the two or three of us who 
were there was : What is the figure below 
which a professor of a given grade (assistant, 
associate, or full professor) cannot maintain 
himself here on a basis which will not lower his 
efficiency in his work or his dignity in the com- 
munity? We finally agreed on certain figures. 
"Well," said Hoover, "that must be the mini- 
mum salary of the grade." 

He knows what he wants to do, and goes 
straight forward toward doing it; but if diffi- 
culty too great intervenes — it really has to be 
very great — he withdraws for a fresh start and 
tries another path. I always think of him as 
outside of a circle in the center of which is his 
goal. He strikes the circle at one spot; if he 
can get through, well and good. If not he 
draws away, moves a little around the circum- 

132 



THE WAR: THE MAN 

ference and strikes again. This resourceful- 
ness and fertility of method are conspicuous 
characteristics of him. To that degree he is 
"diplomatic." But if there is only one way he 
fights to the extreme along that way. ' And 
those of us who have lived through the diffi- 
cult, the almost impossible, days of Belgian re- 
lief, food administration, and general Euro- 
pean after-the-war relief, with him, have come 
to an almost superstitious belief in his capacity 
to do anything possible to human power. 

He has a great gift of lucid exposition. His 
successful argument with Lloyd George, who 
began a conference with him on the Belgian 
relief work strongly opposed to it on grounds 
of its alleged military disadvantages to the Al- 
lies, and closed it by the abrupt statement: 
"I am convinced; you have my permission," 
is a conspicuous example, among many, of his 
way of winning adherence to his plans, on a 
basis of good grounds and lucid and effective 
presentation of them. He has no voice for 
speaking to great audiences, no flowers of rhet- 
oric or familiar platitudes for professional ora- 
tory, but there is no more effective living 

133 



HERBERT HOOVER 

speaker to small groups or conferences around 
the council table. He is clear and convincing 
in speech because he is clear and precise in 
thinking. He is fertile in plan and construc- 
tive in method because he has creative imagina- 
tion. 

The first of his war calls to service came just 
as he was preparing to return to America from 
London where he had brought his family from 
California to spend the school vacation of 1914. 
Their return passage was engaged for the mid- 
dle of August. But the war came on, and with 
it his first relief undertaking. It was only the 
trivial matter — trivial in comparison with his 
later undertakings — of helping seventy thou- 
sand American travelers, stranded at the out- 
break of the war, to get home. These people, 
rich and |)oor alike, found themselves penniless 
and helpless because of the sudden moratorium. 
Letters of credit, travelers' checks, drafts, all 
were mere printed paper. They needed real 
money, hotel rooms, steamer passages, and ad- 
vice. And there was nobody in London, not 
even the benevolent and most willing but in this 
respect powerless American ambassador who 

134 



THE WAR: THE MAN 

could help them. At least there seemed none 
until Hoover transferred the "relief" which 
had automatically congested about his private 
offices in the "city" during the first two days to 
larger headquarters in the Hotel Savoy. He 
gathered together all his available money and 
that of American friends and opened a unique 
bank which had no depositors and took in no 
money, but continuously gave it out against 
personal checks signed by unknown but Ameri- 
can-looking people on unknown banks in Walla 
Walla and Fresno and Grand Rapids and 
Dubuque and Emporia and New Bedford. 
And he found rooms in hotels and passage on 
steamers, first-class, second-class or steerage, 
as happened to be possible. Now on all these 
checks and promises to pay, just $250 failed 
to be realized by the man who took a risk on 
American honesty to the extent of several hun- 
dred thousand dollars. 

Some of the incidents of this "relief" were 
pathetic, and some were comic. One day the 
banker and his staff, which was composed of 
his wife and their friends, were startled 
by the apparition in the front office of a 

135 



HERBERT HOOVER 

group of American plains Indians, Black- 
feet and Sioux, all in the most Fenimore Coop- 
erish of full Indian dress, feathers and skins, 
war-paint and tomahawks. They had been 
part of a Wild West show and menagerie 
caught by the war's outbreak in Austria, and 
had, after incredible experiences, made their 
way out, dropping animals and baggage as 
they progressed, until they had with them only 
what they had on, which in order to save the 
most valuable part of their portable furniture, 
was their most elaborate costumes. They had 
got to London, but to do it they had used up the 
last penny and the last thing they could sell or 
pawn except their clothes, which they had to 
wear to cover their red skins. Hoover's Ameri- 
can bank saw these original Americans off, with 
joyful whoopings of gratitude, for Wyoming. 
But the work was not limited to lending the 
barely necessary funds to those who wished 
to borrow. He raised a charitable fund among 
these same friends for caring for the really 
destitute ones until other relief could come. 
This came in the shape of the American Gov- 
ernment's "ship of gold," the battle-ship Ten- 

136 



THE WAR: THE MAN 

nessee, sent over to the rescue. Hoover was 
then asked by Ambassador Page and the 
Army officers in charge of the London con- 
signment of this gold to persuade his volun- 
teer committee to continue their labors during 
its distribution. With this money available 
all who were able to produce proof of Ameri- 
can citizenship could be given whatever was 
necessary to enable them to reach their own 
country. 

And then came the next insistent call for 
help. And in listening to it, and, with swift 
decision, undertaking to respond to it, Herbert 
Hoover launched himself, without in any de- 
gree realizing it, on a career of public service 
and corresponding abnegation of private busi- 
ness and self-interest, that was to last all 
through the war and through the armistice 
period, and is today still going on. In all this 
period of war and after-war service he has 
received no salary from government or relief 
organizations but, on the contrary, has given 
up a large income as expert mining engineer 
and director of mining companies. In addi- 
tion, he has paid out a large sum for personal 

137 



HERBERT HOOVER 

expenses incurred in connection with the work. 
The call was for the relief of Belgium. I 
know the story of Hoover in his relation to 
the relief of Belgium very well because I be- 
came one of his helpers in it soon after the war 
began and remained in it until the end. But it 
is a hard story to tell ; there is too much of it. 
My special duties were of a kind to keep me 
constantly in touch with "the Chief," and I 
was able to realize, as only a few others were, 
the load of nerve-racking responsibility and 
herculean labor carried by him behind the more 
open scene of the public money-gathering, 
food-buying and transporting, and daily feed- 
ing of the ten million imprisoned people of 
occupied Belgium and France. In the relief 
of these helpless peoples Hoover put, perhaps 
for the first time, certainly for the first time 
on any such enormous scale and with such out- 
standing success, philanthropy on a basis of 
what dear old Horace Fletcher, shut up with 
us in Belgium during the Occupation, would 
permit to be referred to by no other phrase than 
the somewhat hackneyed one of "engineering 
efficiency," unless we would use a new word for 

138 



THE WAR: THE MAN 

it which he coined. In fact he used the new 
word "Hooverizing" as a synonym for effi- 
ciency with a heart in it, two years before it be- 
came familiar in America with another mean- 
ing. And I prefer his meaning of the word to 
that of the food-saving meaning with which we 
became familiar in Food Administration days. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM', ORGANIZATION AND 
DIPLOMATIC DIFFICULTIES 

Despite the general popular knowledge that 
there was a relief of Belgium and that Hoover 
was its organizer and directing head, there still 
seems to he, if I may judge by the questions 
often asked me, no very wide knowledge of 
just why there had to be such relief of Belgium 
and how Herbert Hoover came to undertake 
it. A fairly full answer to these queries makes 
a proper introduction to any account, however 
brief, of his participation in this extraordinary 
part of the history of the war. 

The World War began, as we all most viv- 
idly remember, with the successful, although 
briefly but most importantly delayed invasion 
of Belgium. And this invasion resulted in 
producing very promptly not only a situation 
appalling in its immediate realization, but one 

140 



THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

of even more terrifying possibilities for the near 
future. For through the haze of the smoke- 
clouds from burning towns and above the rat- 
tle of the machine guns in Dinant and Louvain 
could be seen the hovering specter of starva- 
tion and heard the wailing of hungry children. 
And how the specter was to be made to pass 
and the children to hush their cries was soon 
the problem of all problems for Belgium. 

Within ten weeks after the first shots of the 
War all of Belgium except that dreary little 
stretch of sand and swamp in the northwestern 
corner of it that for over four years was all of 
the Kingdom of Belgium under the rule of 
King Albert, was not only in the hands of a 
brutal enemy but was enclosed and shut away 
from the rest of the world by a rigid ring of 
steel. Not only did the Germans maintain a 
ring of bayonets and electrified wire fence — 
this latter along the Belgian-Dutch frontier — 
around it, but the Allies, recognizing that for 
all practical purposes, Occupied Belgium 
was now German territory, had to include it in 
their blockade of the German coast. Thus no 
persons or supplies could pass in or out of Bel- 

141 



HERBERT HOOVER 

gium except under extraordinary circum- 
stances, such as a special permission from both 
Germany and Allies or a daring and almost im- 
possible blockade-running. 

Now Belgium is not, as America is, self- 
sustaining as to food. If an enemy could com- 
pletely blockade us, we could go on living in- 
definitely on the food we produce. But Bel- 
gium could not ; nor could England or France 
or Italy. Belgium is not primarily an agricul- 
tural country, despite the fact that what agri- 
culture it does have is the most intensive and 
highly developed in Europe. It is an indus- 
trial country, the most highly industrialized in 
Europe, with only one sixth of its people sup- 
porting themselves by agriculture. It depends 
upon constant importations for fifty per cent 
of its general food needs and seventy-five per 
cent of its needed food-grains. 

The ring of steel about Belgium, then, if not 
promptly broken, plainly meant starvation. 
The imprisoned Belgians saw, with the pass- 
ing days, their little piles of stored food sup- 
plies get lower. They had immediately begun 
rationing themselves. The Government and 

142 



THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

cities had taken possession of such small food 
stocks as had not been seized by the Germans 
for their armies, and were treating them as a 
common supply for all the people. They dis- 
tributed this food as well as they could during 
a reign of terror with all railways and motors 
controlled by their conquerors. They lived in 
those first weeks on little food but much hope. 
For were not their powerful protectors, the 
French and English, very quickly going to 
drive the invaders back and out of their coun- 
try? But it soon became apparent that it was 
the Allied armies that were being driven not 
only out of Belgium but farther and farther 
back into France. So the Allies could do noth- 
ing, and the Germans would do nothing to help 
them. Indeed, everything the Germans did 
was to make matters worse. There was only 
one hope; they must have food from outside 
sources, and to do this they must have recourse 
to some powerful neutral help. 

Belgium, and particularly Brussels, has al- 
ways had its American colony. And it was to 
these Americans that Belgium turned for help. 
Many members of the colony left as soon after 

143 



HERBERT HOOVER 

the war began as they could, but some, headed 
by Minister Brand Whitlock, remained. 
When the Belgian court left Brussels for Ant- 
werp, and later for Le Havre, part of the dip- 
lomatic corps followed it, but a smaller part 
stayed in Brussels to occupy for the rest of the 
war a most peculiar position. Mr. Whitlock 
elected to stay. It was a fortunate election 
for the Belgians. Also it meant many things, 
most of them interesting, for the sympathetic 
Minister. 

When the American expatriates in Belgium 
who wished to leave after the war began, ap- 
plied to Minister Whitlock for help to become 
repatriates, he called to his assistance certain 
American engineers and business men then 
resident in Brussels, notably Messrs. Daniel 
Heineman, Millard Shaler, and William 
Hulse. He also had the very effective help of 
his First Secretary of Legation, Mr. Hugh 
Gibson, now our Minister to Poland. These 
men were able to arrange the financial difficul- 
ties of the fleeing Americans despite closed 
banks, disappearing currency, and general 
financial paralysis. When this was finished 

144 



THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

they readily turned to the work of helping the 
Belgians, the more readily because they were 
the right sort of Americans. 

Their first effort, in cooperation with the 
burgomaster of Brussels and a group of Brus- 
sels business men, was the formation of a Cen- 
tral Committee of Assistance and Provision- 
ing, under the patronage of the Ministers of 
the United States and Spain (Mr. Whitlock 
and the Marques de Villalobar). This com- 
mittee was first active in the internal measures 
for relief already referred to, but soon finding 
that the shipping about over the land of the 
rapidly disappearing food stocks of the coun- 
try and the special assistance of the destitute 
and out-of-work — the destruction of factories 
and the cessation of the incoming of raw ma- 
terials had already thrown tens of thousands of 
men out of employment — must be replaced by 
a more radical relief, this committee resolved 
to approach the Germans for permission to at- 
tempt to bring in food supplies from outside 
the country. 

Burgomaster Max had already written on 
September 7 to Major General Luettwitz, the 

145 



HERBERT HOOVER 

German Military Governor of Brussels, ask- 
ing for permission to import foodstuffs through 
the Holland-Belgium border, and the city au- 
thorities of Charleroi had also begun negotia- 
tion with the German authorities in their 
province (Hainaut) to the same end, but little 
attention had been paid to these requests. 
Therefore the Americans of the committee de- 
cided, as neutrals, to take up personally with 
the German military authorities the matter of 
arranging imports. 

A general permission for the importation of 
foodstuffs into Belgium by way of the Dutch 
frontier was finally obtained from the German 
authorities in Belgium, together with their 
guarantee that all such imported food would 
be entirely free from requisition by the Ger- 
man army. Also, a special permission was ac- 
corded to Mr. Shaler to go to Holland, and, if 
necessary, to England to try to arrange for 
obtaining and transporting to Belgium certain 
kinds and quantities of foodstuffs. But no 
money could be sent out of Belgium to pay for 
them, except a first small amount which Mr. 
Shaler was allowed to take with him. 

146 



THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

In Holland, Mr. Shaler found the Dutch 
government quite willing to allow foodstuffs 
to pass through Holland for Belgium, but it 
asked him to try to arrange to find the sup- 
plies in England. Holland already saw that 
she would need to hold all of her food supplies 
for her own people. So Shaler went on to Eng- 
land. Here he tried to interest influential 
Americans in Belgium's great need, and, 
through Edgar Rickard, an American engin- 
eer, he was introduced to Herbert Hoover. 

This brings us to Hoover's connection with 
the relief of Belgium. But there was necessary 
certain official governmental interest on the 
part of America and the Allies before anybody 
could really do much of anything. Hoover 
therefore introduced Shaler to Dr. Page, the 
American Ambassador, a man of heart, de- 
cision, and prompt action. This was on Oc- 
tober 7. A few days before, on September 29, 
to be exact, Shaler together with Hugh Gib- 
son, the Secretary of the American Legation 
in Brussels who had followed Shaler to Lon- 
don, had seen Count Lalaing, the Belgian min- 
ister to England, and explained to him the 

147 



HERBERT HOOVER 

situation inside of Belgium. They also handed 
him a memorandum pointing out that there 
was needed a permit from the British Govern- 
ment allowing the immediate exportation of 
about 2,500 tons of wheat, rice, beans, and 
peas to Belgium. Mr. Shaler had brought with 
him from Brussels money provided by the Bel- 
gian Comite Central sufficient to purchase 
about half this amount of foodstuffs. 

The Belgian Minister transmitted the re- 
quest for a permit to the British Government 
on October 1. On October 6 he received a 
reply which he, in turn, transmitted to the 
American Ambassador in London, Mr. Page. 
This reply from the British Government gave 
permission to export foodstuffs from England 
through Holland into Belgium, under the 
German guarantees that had previously been 
obtained by Mr. Heineman's committee, on 
the condition that the American Ambassador 
in London, or Americans representing him, 
would ship the foodstuffs from England, con- 
signed to the American Minister in Brussels; 
that each sack of grain should be plainly 
marked accordingly, and that the foodstuffs 

148 



THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

should be distributed under American control 
solely to the Belgian civil population. 

On October 7, the day that Hoover had 
taken Shaler to the American Embassy and 
they had talked matters over with Mr. Page, 
the Ambassador cabled to Washington outlin- 
ing the British Government's authorization and 
suggesting that, if the American Government 
was in accord with the whole matter as far 
as it had gone, it should secure the approval 
of the German Government. After a lapse of 
four or five days, Ambassador Page received 
a reply from Washington in which it was stated 
that the American Government had taken the 
matter up with Berlin on October 8. 

After an exchange of telegrams between 
Brussels, London, Washington, and Berlin, 
Ambassador Page was informed on October 
18 by Ambassador Gerard, then American 
Ambassador in Berlin, that the German Gov- 
ernment agreed to the arrangement, and the 
following day confirmation of this was received 
from Washington. 

Sometime during the course of these nego- 
tiations Ambassador Page and the Belgian au- 

149 



HERBERT HOOVER 

thorities formally asked Hoover to take on the 
task of organizing the relief work, if the diplo- 
matic arrangements came to a satisfactory con- 
clusion. His sympathetic and successful work 
in looking after the stranded Americans, all 
done under the appreciative eyes of the Ameri- 
can Ambassador, had recommended him as the 
logical head of the new and larger humanitar- 
ian effort. Hoover had agreed, and his first 
formal step, taken on October 10, in organizing 
the work, was to enlist the existing American 
Relief Committee, whose work was then prac- 
cally over, in the new undertaking. He 
amalgamated its principal membership with 
the Americans in Brussels, and on October 
13, issued in the name of this committee an 
appeal to the American people to consolidate 
all Belgian relief funds and place them in the 
hands of the committee for disposal. At the 
same time Minister Whitlock cabled an appeal 
to President Wilson to call on America for aid 
in the relief of Belgium. 

Between October 10 and 16 it was de- 
termined by Ambassador Page and Mr. 
Hoover that it was desirable to set up a wholly 

150 



THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

new neutral organization. Hoover enlisted the 
support of Messrs. John B. White, Millard 
Hunsiker, Edgar Rickard, J. F. Lucey, and 
Clarence Graff, all American engineers and 
business men then in London, and these men, 
together with Messrs. Shaler and Hugh Gib- 
son, thereupon organized, and on October 22 
formally launched, "The American Commis- 
sion for Relief in Belgium," with Hoover as 
its active head, with the title of chairman 
Ambassador Page and Ministers Van Dyke 
and Whitlock, in The Hague and Brussels, re- 
spectively, were the organization's honorary 
chairmen. A few days afterward, at the sug- 
gestion of Minister Whitlock, Senor Don 
Merry del Val, the Spanish Ambassador in 
London, and Marques de Villalobar, the Span- 
ish Minister in Brussels, both of whom had 
been consulted in the arrangements in Bel- 
gium and London, were added to the list of 
honorary chairmen. And, a little later, there 
were added the names of Mr. Gerard, the 
American Ambassador at Berlin, Mr. Sharp, 
our Ambassador at Paris, and Jongkeer de 
Weede, the Dutch Minister to the Belgian 

151 



HERBERT HOOVER 

Government at Le Havre where it had taken 
refuge. At the same time the name of the 
Commission was modified hy dropping from it 
the word "American" in deference to the of- 
ficial connection of the Spanish diplomats with 
it. The new organization thus became styled 
"The Commission for Relief in Belgium," 
which remained its official title through its ex- 
istence. This name was promptly reduced, in 
practical use by its members, with characteristic 
American brevity, to "C. R. B.," which, pro- 
nounced "tsay-er-bay," was also soon the one 
most widely used in Belgium and Occupied 
France by Belgian, French, and Germans 
alike. 

I have given this account of the organization 
and status of the Commission in so much detail 
because it reveals its imposing official appear- 
ance which was of inestimable value to it in car- 
rying on its running diplomatic difficulties all 
through the war. The official patronage of the 
three neutral governments, American, Span- 
ish and Dutch, gave us great strength in fac- 
ing the repeated assaults on our existence and 
the constant interference with our work by 

152 



THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

German officials and officers. I have earlier 
used the phrase "satisfactory conclusion of dip- 
lomatic arrangements." There never was, in 
the whole history of the Commission, any sat- 
isfactory conclusion of such arrangements; 
there were sufficiently satisfactory conditions 
to enable the work to go on effectively but there 
was always serious diplomatic difficulty. Min- 
isters Whitlock and Villalobar, our "protecting 
Ministers" in Brussels, had to bear much of 
the brunt of the difficulties, but the Commission 
itself grew to have almost the diplomatic stand- 
ing of an independent nation, its chairman and 
the successive resident directors in Brussels act- 
ing constantly as unofficial but accepted inter- 
mediaries between the Allies and the Germans. 
The "C. R. B." was organized. It had its 
imposing list of diplomatic personages. It 
had a chairman and secretary and treasurer and 
all the rest. But to feed the clamoring Bel- 
gians it had to have food. To have food it had 
to have money, much money, and with this 
money food in large quantity had to be ob- 
tained in a world already being ransacked by 
the purchasing agents of France and England 

153 



HERBERT HOOVER 

seeking the stocks that these countries knew 
would soon be necessary to meet the growing 
demands of their armies and civilians drawn 
from production into the great game of de- 
struction. Once obtained, the food had to be 
transported overseas and through the mine- 
strewn Channel to Rotterdam, the nearest open 
port of Belgium, and thence by canals and 
railways into the starving country and its use 
there absolutely restricted to the civil popula- 
tion. Finally, the feeding of Belgium had to 
begin immediately and arrangements had to be 
made to keep it up indefinitely. The war was 
not to be a short one; that was already plain. 
It was up to Hoover to get busy, very busy. 

The first officials of the C. R. B. and all 
the men who came into it later, agree on one 
thing. We relied confidently on our chairman 
to organize, to drive, to make the impossible 
things possible. We did our best to carry out 
what it was our task to do. If we had ideas 
and suggestions they were welcomed by him. 
If good they were adopted. But principally 
we worked as we were told for a man who 
worked harder than any of us, and who 

154 



THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

planned most of the work for himself and all 
of us. 

He had the vision. He saw from the first 
that the relief of Belgium would be a large 
job; it proved to be a gigantic one. He saw 
that all America would have to be behind us; 
indeed that the whole humanitarian world 
would have to back us up, not merely in funds 
but in moral support. For the military logic 
of the situation was only half with us; it was 
half against us. The British Admiralty, trying 
to blockade Germany completely, saw in the 
feeding of ten million Belgians and French in 
German-occupied territory a relief to the occu- 
piers who would, by the accepted rules of the 
game, have to feed these people from their own 
food supplies. The fact that the Germans de- 
clared from the first that they never would do 
this and in every test proved that they would 
not, was hard to drive home to the Admiralty 
and to many amateur English strategists safely 
far from the sufferings of the hungering Bel- 
gians. 

On the other hand other influential govern- 
mental officials, notably the Prime Minister 

155 



HERBERT HOOVER 

and the heads of the Foreign Office, saw in 
the Allied help for these people the only 
means to prevent them from saving their 
lives in the one other way possible to them, 
that is, by working for the Germans. 
Fathers of families, however patriotic, cannot 
see their wives and children starve to death 
when rescue is possible. And the Germans of- 
fered this rescue to them all the time. Never a 
day in all the four years when German placards 
offering food and money for their work did not 
stare in the faces the five hundred thousand 
idle skilled Belgian workmen and the other 
hundreds of thousands of unskilled ones shut 
up in the country. 

Germany, also, had two opinions about Bel- 
gian relief. There were zu Reventlow and his 
great party of jingoes who cried from begin- 
ning to end: Kick out these American spies; 
make an end of this soft-heartedness. Here 
we have ten million Allied hostages in our 
hands. Let us say to England and France and 
the refugee Belgian cabinet at Le Havre : Your 
people may eat what they now have ; it will last 
them a month or two ; then they shall not have 

156 



THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

a mouthful from Germany or anywhere else 
unless you give up the blockade and open the 
ports of Belgium and Germany alike to in- 
coming foods. 

On the other side were von Bissing and his 
German governing staff in Belgium, together 
with most of the men of the military General 
Staff at Great Headquarters. Von Bissing 
tried, in his heavy, stupid way, to placate the 
Belgians; that was part of his policy. So he 
would offer them food — always for work — with 
one hand, while he gave them a slap with the 
other. He wanted Belgium to be tranquil. 
He did not want to have openly to machine- 
gun starving mobs in the cities, however many 
unfortunates he allowed to be quietly carried 
out to the Tir National at gray dawn to stand 
for one terrible moment before the ruthless 
firing squad. And the hard-headed men of the 
General Staff knew that starving people do not 
lie down quietly and die. All the northern lines 
of communication between the west front and 
Germany ran through the countries of these 
ten million imprisoned French and Belgians. 
Even without arms they could make much 

157 



HERBERT HOOVER 

trouble for the guards of bridges and railways 
in their dying struggles. At least it would re- 
quire many soldiers to kill them fast enough to 
prevent it. And the soldiers, all of them, were 
needed in the trenches. In addition the Ger- 
man General Staff earnestly desired and hoped 
up to the very last that America would keep 
out of the war. And these extraordinary 
Americans in Belgium seemed to have all of 
America behind them; that is what the great 
relief propaganda and the imposing list of 
diplomatic personages on the C. R. B. list were 
partly for. Hoover had realized from the be- 
ginning what this would mean. "No," said the 
higher German officials, "it will not do to inter- 
fere too much with these quixotic Americans." 
But the Germans, most of them at least, 
never really understood us. One day as 
Hoover was finishing a conversation with the 
head of the German Pass-Zentral in Brussels, 
trying to arrange for a less vexing and delay- 
ing method of granting passes for the move- 
ments of our men, the German officer said: 
"Well, now tell me, Herr Hoover, as man to 
man, what do you get out of all this? You 

158 



THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

are not doing all this for nothing, surely." 
And a little later, at a dinner at the Great 
Headquarters to which I had been invited by 
one of the chief officers of the General Staff, he 
said to me, as we took our seats: "Well, how's 
business?" I could only tell him that it was 
going as well as any business could that made 
no profits for anybody in it. 

It was impressive to see Hoover in the crises. 
We expected a major crisis once a month and 
a minor one every week. We were rarely dis- 
appointed in our expectations. I may describe, 
for illustration, such a major crisis, a very 
major one, which came in August, 1916. The 
Commission had been making a hard fight all 
summer for two imperatively needed conces- 
sions from the Germans. We wanted the Gen- 
eral Staff to turn over to us for the civil popu- 
lation a larger proportion of the 1916 native 
crop of Occupied France than we had had 
from the 1915 crop. And we wanted some spe- 
cial food for the 600,000 French children in ad- 
dition to the regular program imported from 
overseas. We sorely needed fresh meat, but- 
ter, milk and eggs for them and we had discov- 

159 



HERBERT HOOVER 

ered that Holland would sell us certain quanti- 
ties of these foods. But we had to have the 
special permission of both the Allies and Ger- 
many to bring them in. 

Hoover, working in London, obtained the 
Allied consent. But the Germans were hold- 
ing back. I was pressing the General Staff at 
Great Headquarters at Charleville and von 
Bissing's government at Brussels. Their rea- 
sons for holding back finally appeared. Ger- 
many looked on Holland as a storehouse of 
food which might some time, in some way, de- 
spite Allied pressure on the Dutch Govern- 
ment, become available to Germany. Al- 
though the French children were suffering ter- 
ribly, and ceasing all growth and development 
for lack of the tissue-building foods, the Ger- 
mans preferred not to let us help them with the 
Dutch food but to cling to their long chance 
of sometime getting it for themselves. 

Hoover came over to Brussels and, together, 
we started for Berlin. We discovered von 
Bissing's chief political adviser, Baron von 
der Lancken and his principal assistant, Dr. 
Rieth, on the same train. These were the two 

160 



THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

men who, after the armistice, proposed to 
Hoover by wire through our Rotterdam office, 
to arrange with him for getting food into Ger- 
many and received by prompt return wire 
through the same intermediary: "Mr. Hoover's 
personal compliments and request to go to hell. 
If Mr. Hoover has to deal with Germany for 
the Allies it will at least not be with such a 
precious pair of scoundrels." 

When these gentlemen, who had helped 
greatly in making our work and life in Bel* 
gium very difficult, saw us, they were somewhat 
confused but finally told us they were called 
to Berlin for a great conference on the relief 
work. When we reached Berlin we found three 
important officers from Great Headquarters in 
the Hotel Adlon. Two of them we knew well ; 
they had always been fairly friendly to us. The 
third was General von Sauberzweig, military 
governor of Brussels at the time of Miss Cav- 
ell's execution, and the man of final responsibil- 
ity for her death. As a result of the excitement 
in Berlin because of the world-wide indignation 
over the Cavell affair he had been removed 
from Brussels by promotion to the Quarter- 

161 



HERBERT HOOVER 

master Generalship at Great Headquarters! 

The Berlin conference of important repre- 
sentatives of all the government departments 
and the General Staff had been called as a re- 
sult of the influence of zu Reventlow and the 
jingoes who wished to break down the Belgian 
relief. We were not invited ; we just happened 
to be there. We could not attend the confer- 
ence, but we could work on the outside. We 
went to Ambassador Gerard for advice. The 
Allies were pressing the Commission to get the 
concessions on the 1916 native crop. Our ef- 
fort to get the food for the children was en- 
tirely our own affair. Mr. Gerard advised 
Hoover to rely entirely on the Commission's 
reputation for humanity and neutrality; to 
keep the position of the Allies wholly out of the 
discussion. But this was indeed only the con- 
firmation by a wise diplomat of the idea of the 
situation that Hoover already had. 

Most of the conference members were 
against the relief. At the end of the first ses- 
sion Lancken and one of the Headquarters 
officers told us that things were almost certainly 
going wrong. They advised Hoover to give 

162 



THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

up. What he did was to work harder. He 
forced the officials of the Foreign Office and 
Interior to hear him. He pictured the horrible 
consequences to the entire population of Bel- 
gium and Occupied France of breaking off the 
relief, and painted vividly what the effect would 
be on the neutral world, America, Spain, and 
Holland in very sight and sound of the catas- 
trophe. He pleaded and reasoned — and won! 
It was harder than his earlier struggle with 
Lloyd- George, already entirely well inclined 
by feelings of humanity, but in each case he 
had saved the relief. Not only did the confer- 
ence not destroy the work, but by continued 
pressure later at Brussels and Great Head- 
quarters we obtained the agreements for an in- 
crease of the civilian allotment out of the 1916 
French crop and for the importation of some 
of the Dutch food for the 600,000 suffering 
children. It was a characteristic Hooverian 
achievement in the face of imminent disaster. 

Hoover and the C. R. B. were in Belgium 
and France for but one purpose, to feed the 
people, to save a whole nation from starvation. 
To them the political aspects of the work were 

163 



HERBERT HOOVER 

wholly incidental, but they could not be over- 
looked. So with the Germans disagreeing 
among themselves, it was the impossibility 
of France's letting the two and a half 
million people of her own shut up in the occu- 
pied territory starve under any circumstances 
possible to prevent, and the humanitarian feel- 
ing of Great Britain and America, which 
Hoover, by vivid propaganda, never allowed 
to cool, and the strength of which he never let 
the diplomats and army and navy officials lose 
sight of, that turned the scale and enabled the 
Commission for Relief in Belgium to continue 
its work despite all assault and interference. 
Over and over again it looked like the end, and 
none of us, even the sanguine Chief, was sure 
that the next day would not be the last. But 
the last day did not come until the last day of 
need had passed, and never from beginning to 
end did a single commune of all the five thou- 
sand of Occupied Belgium and France fail of 
its daily bread. It was poor bread sometimes, 
even for war bread, and there were many to- 
morrows that promised to be breadless, but no 
one of those tomorrows ever came. 

164 



CHAPTER IX 

THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM ; SCOPE AND METHODS 

I have dropped the thread of my tale. Our 
narrative of the organization of the Commis- 
sion for Relief in Belgium had brought us only 
to the time when the Commission was actually 
ready to work, and we have leaped to the very 
end of those bitter hard four years. We must 
make a fresh start. 

First, then, as to money. And to understand 
about the money it is necessary to understand 
the two-phased character of the relief of Bel- 
gium. There was the phase of ravitaillement, 
the constant provisioning of the whole land; 
and the phase of secoars, the special care of the 
destitute and the ill and the children. 

The ring of steel did not immediately make 
beggars of all the Belgians enclosed within it. 
Many of them still had money. But, as I have 
already said, the Germans would not allow any 

165 



HERBERT HOOVER 

of this money to go out. It could buy only 
what was in Belgium. And as Belgium could 
produce only about half the food it needed to 
keep its people alive, and only one fourth of 
the particular kind of foodstuffs that were 
necessary for bread, and as it was arranged, 
by control of the mills and bakeries, that these 
bread-grains should be evenly distributed 
among all the people, it meant that even though 
banker this or baron that might have money to 
buy much more, he could really buy, with all 
his money, only one fourth as much bread as 
he needed. There had to be, in other words, a 
constant bringing in of enough wheat and flour 
to supply three fourths of the bread-needs of 
the whole country, and another large fraction 
of the necessary fats and milk and rice and 
beans and other staples. This was the ravi- 
taillement. 

But even with the food thus brought in there 
were many persons, and as the days and months 
and years passed they increased to very many, 
who had no money to buy this food. They 
were the destitute, the families of the hundreds 
of thousands of men thrown out of work by the 

166 



THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

destruction of the factories and the cessation 
of all manufacturing and commerce. And 
there were the Government employees, the art- 
ists, the lace-making women and girls, and a 
whole series of special kinds of wage-earners, 
with all wages suddenly stopped. To all these 
the food had to be given without pay. This 
was the secours. 

To obtain the food from America and Ar- 
gentina and India and wherever else it could 
be found a constant supply of money in huge 
amounts was necessary. Hoover realized from 
the beginning that no income from charity 
alone could provide it. His first great problem 
was to assure the Commission of means for the 
general ravitaillement. He solved the problem 
but it took time. In the meanwhile the pres- 
sure for immediate relief was strong. He be- 
gan to buy on the credit of a philanthropic or- 
ganization which had so far no other assets than 
the private means of its chairman and his 
friends. 

The money, as finally arranged for, came 
from government subventions about equally 
divided between England and France, in the 

167 



HERBERT HOOVER 

form of loans to the Belgian Government, put 
into the hands of the Commission. Later when 
the United States came into the war, this coun- 
try made all the advances. Altogether nearly 
a billion dollars were spent by the C. R. B. for 
supplies and their transportation, at an over- 
head expense of a little more than one half of 
one per cent. This low overhead is a record in the 
annals of large philanthropic undertaking, and 
is a measure of the voluntary service of the or- 
ganization and of its able management. 

For the secours, fifty million dollars worth of 
gifts in money, food and clothing were col- 
lected by the Commission from the charitable 
people of America and Great Britain. The 
Belgians themselves inside the country, the 
provinces, cities, and well-to-do individuals, 
added, under the stimulus of the tragic situa- 
tion and under the direction of the great Bel- 
gian National Committee, hundreds of millions 
of frans to the secours funds. Also the Com- 
mission and the Belgian National Committee 
arranged that a small profit should be charged 
on all the food sold to the Belgians who could 
pay for it, and this profit, which ran into mil- 

168 



THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

lions of dollars, was turned into the funds for 
benevolence. All this created an enormous 
sum for the secours, which was the real "relief," 
as benevolence. And this enormous sum 
was needed, for by the end of the war nearly 
one-half of all the imprisoned population of 
over seven million Belgians and two and a half 
million French were receiving their daily bread 
wholly or partly on charity. Actually one half 
of the inhabitants of the great city of Antwerp 
were at one time in the daily soup and bread 
lines. 

Of the money and goods for benevolence 
that came from outside sources more than one 
third came from England and the British Do- 
minions — New Zealand gave more money per 
capita for Belgian relief than any other coun- 
try — while the rest came chiefly from the 
United States, a small fraction coming from 
other countries. The relief collections in Great 
Britain were made by a single great benevolent 
organization called the "National Committee 
for Relief in Belgium." This Committee, 
under the chairmanship of the Lord Mayor 
of London and the active management of Sir 

169 



HERBERT HOOVER 

William Goode as secretary and Sir Arthur 
Shirley Benn as treasurer, conducted an im- 
pressive continuous campaign of propaganda 
and solicitation of funds with the result of ob- 
taining about $16,000,000 with which to pur- 
chase food and clothing for the Belgian desti- 
tute. 

But in the United States the C. R. B. itself 
directly managed the campaign for charity, 
using its New York office as organizing and 
receiving headquarters. Part of the work was 
carried by definitely organized state commit- 
tees in thirty-seven states and by scattered 
local committees in almost every county and 
large city in the country. Ohio, for example, 
had some form of local organization in eighty 
out of the eighty-eight counties in the state, and 
California had ninety local county and city 
committees all reporting to the central com- 
mittee. 

The American campaign was different from 
the English one in that instead of asking for 
money alone, the call was made, at first, chiefly 
for outright gifts of food, the Commission of- 
fering to serve, in connection with this benevo- 

170 



THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

lence, as a great collecting, transporting and 
distributing agency. This resulted in the ac- 
cumulation of large quantities of foodstuffs of 
a wide variety of kinds, much of it in the nat- 
ure of delicacies and luxuries and most of it 
put up in small packages. Tens of thousands 
of these packages were sent over to Belgium, 
but the cry came back from the Commission's 
workers there that food in this shape was very 
difficult to handle in any systematic way. It 
was quickly evident that what was really needed 
was large consignments in bulk of a few kinds 
of staple and concentrated foods, which could 
be shipped in large lots to the various principal 
distribution centers in Belgium and thence 
shipped in smaller lots to the secondary or 
local centers, and there handed out on a 
definite ration plan. 

A number of states very early concentrated 
their efforts on the loading and sending of 
"state food ships." California sent the Cam- 
ino in December, 1914, and in the same month 
Kansas sent the Hannah loaded with flour 
contributed by the millers of the state. In 
January and March, 1915, two Massachusetts 

171 



HERBERT HOOVER 

relief ships, the Harpalyce (sunk by tor- 
pedo or mine on a later relief voyage) and 
Lynorta, sailed. Oregon and California to- 
gether sent the Cranley in January, 1915, 
loaded with food and clothing, and several 
other similar state ships were sent at later 
dates. A gift from the Rockefeller Foundation 
of a million dollars was used to load wholly or 
in part five relief ships, and the "Millers' Bel- 
gian Relief" movement organized and carried 
through by the editor of the Northwestern Mil- 
lers, Mr. W. C. Edgar, resulted in the contri- 
bution of a full cargo of flour, valued at over 
$450,000, which left Philadelphia for Rotter- 
dam in February, 1915, in the steamer South 
Point. The cargo was accompanied by the 
organizer of the charity, who was able to see 
personally the working of the methods of the 
C. R. B. inside of Belgium and the actual dis- 
tribution of his own relief cargo. His Good 
Samaritan ship was sunk by a German sub- 
marine on her return trip, but fortunately the 
philanthropist was not on her. He returned 
by a passenger liner, and was able to tell the 
people of America what was needed in Bel- 

172 



fTHE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

gium, and what America was doing and could 
further do to help meet the need. 

Later, when it became necessary to obtain 
food from other primary markets in addition 
to those of America, appeal was specifically 
made for gifts of money in place of goods. In 
response to this call various large gifts from 
wealthy individual donors were made, among 
them one of $210,000, another of $200,000, 
and several of $100,000 each, and vari- 
ous large donations came from the efforts of 
special organizations, notably the Daughters 
of the American Revolution, the New York 
Chamber of Commerce, the Cardinal Gibbons' 
Fund from the Catholic children of America, 
the Dollar Christmas Fund organized by Mr. 
Henry Clews, the "Belgian Kiddies, Ltd.," 
fund, organized by Hoover's brother mining 
engineers of the country, and, largest of all, 
the Literary Digest fund of more than half a 
million dollars collected by the efforts of Mr. 
R. J. Cuddihy, editor of the Digest, in sums 
ranging from a few pennies to thousands of 
dollars from children and their parents all over 
the land. 

173 



HERBERT HOOVER 

By far the greater part of the money that 
came to the Commission through state com- 
mittees or through special organizations, or di- 
rectly from individuals to the New York office, 
was made up from small sums representing 
millions of individual givers. And it was a 
beautiful and an important thing that it was 
so. The giving not only helped to save Bel- 
gium from starvation of the body, but it helped 
to save America from starvation of the soul. 
The incidents, pathetic, inspiring, noble, con- 
nected with the giving, gave us tears and smiles 
and heart thrills and thanksgiving for the reve- 
lation of the human love of humanity in those 
neutral days of a distressing pessimism. 

But finding the money and food and cloth- 
ing was but the first great problem for the 
resourceful C. R. B. chairman to solve. Next 
came the serious problem of transportation, 
both overseas and internal. Ships were in 
pressing demand; they constantly grew fewer 
in number because of the submarine sinkings, 
and yet the Commission had constant need of 
more and more. Some way Hoover and his 
associates of the New York and London offices 

174 



THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

got what it was necessary to have, but it was 
only by a continuous and wearing struggle. 
Altogether the C. R. B. delivered seven hun- 
dred and forty full ship cargoes and fifteen 
hundred part cargoes of relief food and cloth- 
ing into its landing port, Rotterdam. The 
seventy ships under constant charter as a regu- 
lar C. R. B. fleet crossed the seas under guar- 
antees from both the Allies and Germany of 
non-molestation by sea raiders or submarines. 
A few accidents happened, but not more than 
twenty cargoes were totally or partly lost at 
sea. Most of the losses came from mines, but 
a few came from torpedoes fired by German 
submarines which either did not or would not 
see the C. R. B. markings on the ships. The 
signals were plain — conspicuous fifty-foot 
pennants flying from the mast-heads, great 
cloth banners stretching along the hull on either 
side, a large house flag, wide deck cloths, and 
two huge red-and-white-striped signal balls 
eight feet in diameter at the top of the masts. 
All these flags and cloths were white, carrying 
the Commission's name or initials (C. R. B.) 
in great red letters. Despite all these, a few 

175 



HERBERT HOOVER 

too eager or too brutal submarine commanders 
let fly their torpedoes at these ships of mercy. 
Hoover's most serious time in connection 
with the overseas transportation, and the most 
critical period as regards supplies in the whole 
course of the relief was just after the putting 
into effect by the Germans, in February, 1917, 
of the unrestricted submarining of all boats 
found in the so-called prohibited ocean zones. 
These zones covered all of the waters around 
the United Kingdom, including all of the 
English Channel and North Sea. This cut us 
off entirely from any access to Rotterdam from 
the West or North. But it also cut Holland 
off. And between our pressure and that of 
Holland the German authorities finally ar- 
ranged for a narrow free, or "safe," north- 
about route extending from the Dutch coast 
north to near the Norwegian coast, thence 
northwest to the Faroe Islands, and thence 
west to the Atlantic beyond the barred zone. 
At one point this "safe" zone was only twenty 
miles wide between the German and English 
mine-fields in the North Sea and any ship get- 
ting a few rods across the line either east or 

176 






THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

west was in great danger from mines and was 
exposed to being torpedoed without warning. 
Imagine the state of mind of a skipper who had 
not seen the sun for three or four days in a 
North Sea fog, trying to make out his position 
accurately enough by dead reckoning to keep 
his boat in that "safe" channel. 

But even this generous concession to the 
Commission and Holland was not arranged 
until March 15, and in the six weeks interven- 
ing between February 1 and this time we did 
not land a single cargo in Rotterdam. Bel- 
gium suffered in body and was nearly crazed 
in mind as we and the Belgian relief heads 
scraped the very floors of our warehouses for 
the last grains of wheat. 

Another almost equally serious interruption 
in the food deliveries had occurred in the pre- 
ceding summer (July, 1916), when, without 
a whisper of warning, Governor General von 
Bissing's government suddenly tied up our 
whole canal-boat fleet by an order permitting 
no Belgian-owned canal boat — although char- 
tered by us — to pass out from Belgium into 
Holland without depositing the full value of 

177 



HERBERT HOOVER 

the boat in money before crossing the frontier. 
The Governor General had reason to fear, he 
said, that some of the boats that went out would 
not come back, and he was going to lose no 
Belgian property subject to German seizure 
without full compensation. As the boats were 
worth, roughly, about $5,000 each, and we were 
using about 500 boats it would have tied up two 
and a half million dollars of our money to meet 
this demand, and tied it up in German hands! 
We simply could not do it. So we began ne- 
gotiations. 

Oh, the innumerable beginnings of nego- 
tiations, and oh, the interminable enduring of 
negotiations, the struggling against form and 
"system," against obstinate and cruel delay — 
for delay in food matters in Belgium was al- 
ways cruel — and sometimes against sheer bru- 
tality! How often did we long to say: Here, 
take these ten million people and feed them or 
starve them as you will! We quit. We can't 
go on fighting your floating mines and too 
eager submarines, your brutal soldiers and 
more brutal bureaucrats. Live up to your 
agreements to help us, or at least do not ob- 

178 



THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

struct us; or, if you won't, then formally and 
officially and publicly before the world kick us 
out as your arch- j ingo, Reventlow, demands. 

But we could not say it ; we could not risk it ; 
it was too certain to be starving rather 
than feeding. So we did not say it, but went on 
with the negotiations. In this particular case 
of the canal boats we finally compromised by 
putting up the value of five boats. If one did 
not come back the Germans were to take out 
its value and we were to replace the money so 
as to keep the pot full. Of course all the boats 
did come back, and now the Belgians and not 
the Germans have them. 

Thus, guarded by guarantees and recogni- 
tion marks, there came regularly, and mostly 
safely, across wide oceans and through the dan- 
gerous mine-strewn Channel or around the 
Faroe Islands, the rice from Rangoon, corn 
from Argentina, beans from Manchuria, and 
wheat and meat and fats from America at the 
rate of a hundred thousand tons a month 
through all the fifty months of the relief. At 
Rotterdam these precious cargoes were swiftly 
transhipped into sealed canal boats — a fleet of 

179 



HERBERT HOOVER 

500 of them with 35 tugs for towing was in 
service — and hurried on through the canals of 
Holland and across the guarded border, and 
then on to the great central depots in Belgium, 
and from there* again by smaller canal boats 
and railway cars and horse-drawn carls under 
all the difficulties of carrying things anywhere 
in a land where anything and everything avail- 
able for transport was subject to requisition 
at any time by an all-controlling military or- 
ganization, to the local warehouses and soup- 
kitchens of every one of the 5,000 Belgian and 
French communes in the occupied territory. 
And always and ever through all the months 
and despite all difficulties on water or land the 
food had to come in time. This was the trans- 
portation undertaking of Hoover's C. R. B. 
Finally when the food was brought to the 
end of its journeying it had to be protected 
from hungry Germans and divided fairly 
among hungry Belgians. Always the world 
asked: But don't the Germans get the food? 
and it still asks: Yes, didn't they? Our truth- 
ful answer then and now is: No. And you 
need not take our answer alone. Ask the Brit- 

180 



THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

ish and French foreign offices. They knew al- 
most as much as we did of what was going on 
inside of the steel ring around Belgium and 
occupied France. Their intelligence services 
were wonderful. Remember the guarantees of 
the German government to us and our pro- 
tecting ministers and ambassadors, the diplo- 
matic representatives of neutral America and 
Spain and Holland. The orders of von Bissing 
and the General Staff were explicit. Official 
German placards forbidding seizure or inter- 
ference by German soldiers or officials were on 
all the canal boats and railway cars and horse 
carts and on all the warehouses used by the 
Commission. 

Of course there were always minor infrac- 
tions but there were no great ones. The Ger- 
mans after the early days of wholesale seizure 
during the invasion and first few months after 
it, got but a trifling amount of food out of 
Belgium and almost none of it came from the 
imported supplies. Every Belgian was a de- 
tective for us in this ceaseless watch for Ger- 
man infractions and we had our own vigilant 
service of "Inspection and Control" by keen- 

181 



HERBERT HOOVER 

eyed young Americans moving ceaselessly all 
over the country and ever checking up con- 
sumption and stocks against records of impor- 
tation. 

And this brings us to the American organi- 
zation inside of Belgium. The New York and 
London and Rotterdam C. R. B. offices had 
their hard-working American staffs and all 
important duties but it was those of us inside 
the ring that really saw Belgian relief in its 
pathetic and inspiring details. We were the 
ones who saw Belgian suffering and bravery, 
s/ and who were privileged to work side by side 
with the great native relief organization with 
its complex of communal and regional and 
provincial committees, and at its head, the great 
Comite National, most ably directed by Emile 
Francqui, whom Hoover had known in China. 
Thirty-five thousand organized Belgians gave 
their volunteer service to their countrymen 
from beginning to end of the long occupation. 
And many thousands more were similarly en- 
gaged in unofficial capacity. We saw the 
splendid work of the women of Belgium in 
their great national organizations, the "Little 

182 



THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

Bees," the "Drop of Milk," the "Discreet As- 
sistance," and all the rest. My wife, who was 
inside with us, has tried to tell the story of the 
women of Belgium in another book, but as she 
rightly says: "The story of Belgium will never 
be told. That is the word that passes oftenest 
between us. No one will ever by word of 
mouth or in writing give it to others in its en- 
tirety, or even tell what he himself has seen and 
felt." 

But the Americans inside know it. Its de- --yC. 
tails will be their ineffaceable memories. It is 
a misfortune that so few Americans could 
share this experience. For we were never more 
than thirty-five or forty at a time; the Ger- 
mans tried to limit us to twenty-five. We were 
always, in their eyes, potential spies. But we 
did no spying. We were too busy doing what 
Herbert Hoover had us there to do. Also we 
had promised not to spy. But it was a hard 
struggle to maintain the correctly neutral be- 
havior which we were under obligation to do. 
And when the end of this strain came, which 
was when America entered the War, and the 
inside Americans had to go out, they all, al- 

183 



HERBERT HOOVER 

most to a man, rushed to the trenches to make 
their protest, with gun in hand, against Ger- 
man Kultur as it had been exemplified under 
their eyes in Belgium. 

Altogether about two hundred Americans 
represented the C. R. B. at various times in- 
side of Belgium. They were mostly young uni- 
versity men, representing forty different 
American colleges and universities in their al- 
legiance. A group of twenty Rhodes Scholars 
whom Hoover hurriedly recruited from Ox- 
ford at the beginning of the work was the pio- 
neer lot. All of these two hundred were se- 
lected for intelligence, honor, discretion, and 
idealism. They had to be able, or quickly 
learn, to speak French. They had to be adapt- 
able and capable of carrying delicate and large 
responsibility. They were a wonderful lot and 
they helped prove the fact that either the 
American kind of university education, or the 
American inheritance of mental and moral 
qualities, or the two combined, can justly be 
a source of American self-congratulation. 

They were patient and long-suffering under 
difficulties and provocation. Ted Curtis, whose 

184 



THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

grandfather was George William, did, on the 
occasion of his seventeenth unnecessary arrest 
by German guards, express his opinion of his 
last captor in what he thought was such pu:'e 
Americanese as to be safely beyond German 
understanding. But when his captor dryly re- 
sponded in an equally pure argot: "Thanks, 
old man, the same to youse," he resolved to take 
all the rest in silence. And it was only after 
the third stripping to the skin in a cold sentry 
post that Robert W., a college instructor, made 
a mild request to the C. R. B. director in Brus- 
sels to ask von Bissing's staff to have their 
rough-handed sleuths conduct their examina- 
tions in a warmer room. 

The relation of the few Americans in Bel- 
gium to the many Belgian relief workers was 
that of advisors, inspectors and final authori- 
ties as to the control and distribution of the 
food. The Americans were all too few to hand A^ 
the food out personally to the hosts in the soup 
lines, at the communal kitchens, and in the long 
queues with rations cards before the doors of 
the bakeries and the communal warehouses. 
They could not personally manage the chil- 

185 



HERBERT HOOVER 

dren's canteens, the discreet assistance to the 
"ashamed poor," who could not bring them- 
selves to line up for the daily soup and bread, 
nor the cheap restaurants where meals were 
served at prices all the way from a fourth to 
three fourths of their cost. The Belgians did 
all this, but the Americans were a seeing, help- 
ing, advising, and when necessary, finally con- 
trolling part of it all. 

The mills and bakeries were all under the 
fclose control of the Commission and the Bel- 
gian National Committee. The sealed canal 
boats were opened only under the eyes of the 
Americans. The records of every distributing 
station were constantly checked by the Ameri- 
cans. They sat at all the meetings of National 
and Provincial and Regional committees. 
They raced about the country in all weathers 
and over all kinds of roads in their much- 
worn open motor-cars, specially authorized and 
constantly watched and frequently examined 
by the Germans, each car carrying the little 
triangular white and red- lettered C. R. B. flag, 
that flapped encouragement as it passed, to 
all the hat-doffing Belgians. 

186 



THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

I am constantly asked: What were Hoov- 
er's personal duties and work in the relief days ? 
It is a question one cannot answer in two words. 
His was all the responsibility, his the major 
planning, the resourceful devising of ways out 
of difficulty, the generalship. But the details 
were his also. He kept not only in closest touch 
with every least as well as greatest phase of 
the work, but took a personal active part in 
seeing everything through. Constant confer- 
ences with the Allied foreign offices and treas- 
uries, and personal inspection of the young men 
sent over from America as helpers ; swift move- 
ments between England and France and 
Belgium and Germany and America, 
and trips in the little motor launch about 
the harbor at Rotterdam examining the 
warehouses and food ships and floating ele- 
vators and canal boats; these were some of 
his contrasting activities through day fol- 
lowing day in all the months and years of the 
relief. 

Hoover had to make his headquarters in 
London at the Commission's central office. 
Here he could keep constantly in touch by 

187 



HERBERT HOOVER 

cable and post with the offices in New York, 
Rotterdam, and Brussels. The Brussels office 
was allowed to send and receive German-cen- 
sored mail three times a week by way of Hol- 
land, and we could do a limited amount of 
censored telegraphing to Rotterdam over the 
German and Dutch wires and thence to Lon- 
don by English-censored cable. But Hoover 
came regularly every few weeks to Brussels, 
taking his chances with mines and careless sub- 
marines. These were no slight chances. A 
Dutch line was allowed by England and Ger- 
many to run a boat, presumably unmolested, 
two or three times a week between Flushing 
and Thamesmouth. These jumpy little boats, 
which carried passengers only — the hold was 
filled with closed empty barrels lashed together 
to act as a float when trouble came — were the 
only means of bringing our young American 
relief workers to Belgium and of Hoover's fre- 
quent crossings. After seven of the ten boats 
belonging to the line had been lost or seriously 
damaged by mines the thrifty Dutch company 
suspended operation. We had then to cross 
secretly by English dispatch boats, protected 

188 



THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

by destroyers and specially hunted by German 
submarines. 

On the occasion of one of Hoover's crossings 
two German destroyers lying outside of Flush- 
ing harbor ordered the little Dutch boat to 
accompany them to Zeebrugge for examina- 
tion. This happened occasionally and was al- 
ways exciting for the passengers, especially for 
the diplomatic couriers, who promptly dropped 
overboard their letter pouches, specially sup- 
plied with lead weights and holes to let in the 
water and thus insure prompt sinking. As the 
boat and convoying destroyers drew near to 
Zeebrugge, shells or bombs began to drop on 
the water around them. Hoover thought at 
first they were coming from English destroyers 
aiming at the Germans. But he could see no 
English boats. Suddenly an explosion came 
from the water's surface near the boat and the 
man standing next to him fell with his face 
smashed by a bomb fragment. Hoover seized 
him and dragged him around the deck-house to 
the other side of the boat. Another bomb burst 
on that side. He then heard the whir of an 
airplane and looking up saw several English 

189 



HERBERT HOOVER 

bombing planes. Their intention was excel- 
lent, but their aim uncertain. The anti-air- 
craft guns of the German destroyers soon drove 
them away, and the convoy came into Zee- 
brugge harbor where the Dutch boat and pas- 
sengers were inspected with German thorough- 
ness. On Hoover's identity being revealed by 
his papers, he was treated with proper cour- 
tesy and after several of the passengers had 
been taken off the boat it was allowed to go on 
its way to Tilbury. 

Hoover enjoyed an extraordinary position in 
relation to the passport and border regulations 
of all the countries in and out of which he had 
to pass in his movements connected with the 
relief. He was given a freedom in this respect 
enjoyed by no other man. He moved almost 
without hindrance and undetained by formali- 
ties freely in and out of England, France, Hol- 
land, occupied Belgium and France, and Ger- 
many itself, with person and traveling bags 
unexamined. It was a concrete expression of 
confidence in his integrity and perfect correct- 
ness of behavior, that can only be fully under- 
stood by those who had to make any movements 

190 



THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

at all across frontiers in the tense days of the 
war. 

Governor General von Bissing once said to 
me in Brussels, apropos of certain charges that 
had been brought to him by his intelligence 
staff of a questionable behavior on the part of 
one of our men in Belgium — charges easily 
proved to be unfounded: "I have entire confi- 
dence in Mr. Hoover despite my full knowl- 
edge of his intimate acquaintance and associa- 
tion with the British and French Government 
officials and my conviction that his heart is with 
our enemies." As a matter of fact Hoover al- 
ways went to an unnecessary extreme in the 
way of ridding himself of every scrap of writ-, 
ing each time he approached the Holland-Bel- 
gium frontier. He preached absolute honesty,, 
and gave a continuous personal example of 
that honesty to all the C. It. B. men inside the 
steel ring. 

Each time he came to Brussels all of us came 
in from the provinces and occupied France and 
gathered about him while he told us the news of 
the outside world, and how things were going 
in the New York and London offices. And 

191 



HERBERT HOOVER 

then he would talk to us as a brother in the fra- 
ternity and exhort us to forget our difficulties 
and our irritations and play the game well and 
honestly for the sake of humanity and the honor 
of America. After the group talks he would 
listen to the personal troubles, and advise and 
help each man in his turn. People sometimes 
ask me why Hoover has such a strong personal 
hold on all his helpers. The men of the C. 
R. B. know why. 

The Belgian relief and the American food 
administration and the later and still continu- 
ing American relief of Eastern Europe have 
been called, sometimes, in an apparently criti- 
cal attitude, "one man" organizations. If by 
that is meant that there was one man in each 
of them who was looked up to with limitless 
admiration, relied on with absolute confidence, 
and served with entire devotion by all the other 
men in them, the attribution is correct. No 
man in any of these organizations — and 
Hoover gathered about him the best he could 
get — but recognized him as the natural leader. 
He was the "one man," not by virtue of any 
official or artificial rank but by sheer personal 

192 



THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

superiority in both constructive administrative 
capacity and effective practical action. 

Whenever Hoover came, he tried to keep his 
presence unknown except to us and Minister 
Whitlock and the heads of the Belgian organi- 
zation and the German Government with 
whom he had to deal. He would not go, if he 
could help it, to the soup lines and children's 
canteens. Like many another man of great 
strength, he is a man of great sensitiveness. 
He cannot see suffering without suffering him- 
self. And he dislikes thanks. The Belgians 
were often puzzled, sometimes hurt, by his 
avoidance of their heart-felt expression of 
gratitude. Mr. Whitlock was always there and 
had to be always accessible. So they could 
thank him and thank America through him. 
But they rarely had opportunity to thank 
Hoover. 

I remember, though, how their ingenuity 
baffled him once. He had slipped in quietly, 
as usual, at dusk one evening by our courier 
automobile from the Dutch border. But some- 
one passed the word around that night. And 
all the next day, and for the remaining few 

193 



HERBERT HOOVER 

days of his stay there went on a silent greeting 
and thanking of the Commission's chief by 
thousands and thousands of visiting cards and 
messages that drifted like snowflakes through 
the door of the Director's house; engraved 
cards with warm words of thanks from the no- 
bility and wealthy of Brussels ; plainer, printed 
ones from the middle class folk, and bits of 
writing paper with pen or pencil-scrawled 
sentences on them of gratitude and blessing 
from the "little people." My wife would heap 
the day's bringing on a table before him each 
evening and he would finger them over curi- 
ously — and try to smile. 

When the Armistice had come the Belgian 
Government tried to thank him. He would ac- 
cept no decorations. But once again Belgian 
ingenuity conquered. One day just after the 
cessation of the fighting he was visiting the 
King and Queen at La Panne in their simple 
cottage in that little bit of Belgium that the 
Germans never reached. After luncheon the 
members of the Cabinet appeared; they had 
come by motors from Le Havre. And before 
them all the King created a new order, without 

194 






THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM 

ribbon or button or medal, and made Hoover 
its only member. He was simply but solemnly 
ordained "Citizen of the Belgian Nation, and 
Friend of the Belgian People." 

I have spoken only of Belgium. But of the 
ten million in the occupied regions for whom 
Hoover waged his fight against starvation, 
two and a half million were in occupied 
France. Over in that territory things were 
harder both for natives and Americans than 
in Belgium. Under the rigorous control of a 
brutal and suspicious operating army both 
French and Americans worked under the most 
difficult conditions that could be imposed and 
yet allow the relief to go on at all. 

The French population, too, was an espe- 
cially helpless one, for all the men of military 
age and qualifications had gone out as the Ger- 
mans came in. They had time and opportunity 
to do this ; the Belgians had not. Each Ameri- 
can was under the special care — and eyes — of a 
German escort officer. He could only move 
with him at his side, could only talk to the 
French committees with his gray-uniformed 
companion in hearing. He had his meals at 

195 



HERBERT HOOVER 

the same table, slept in his quarters. The chief 
representative of the Commission in occupied 
France had to live at the Great German Head- 
quarters at Charleville on the Meuse. I spent 
an extraordinary four months there. It is all 
a dream now but it was, at the time, a reality 
which no imagination could equal. The Kaiser 
on his frequent visits, the gray-headed chiefs 
of the terrible great German military machine, 
the schneidige younger officers, were all so con- 
fident and insolent and so regardless, in those 
early days of success, of however much of the 
world might be against them. One night my 
officer said at dinner: "Portugal came in today. 
Will it be the United States tomorrow? Well, 
come on; it's all the same to us." When the 
United States did come in we Americans were 
no longer at Headquarters, so what my officer 
said then I do not know. But I am sure that it 
was not all the same to him. 

And so the untellable relief of Belgium and 
Northeast France went on with its myriad 
of heart-breaks and heart-thrills following 
quickly on each other's heels, its highly elabo- 
rated system of organization, its successful ma- 

196 



THE RELIEF OF BELGItJM 

chinery of control and distribution, and all, all 
centering and depending primarily on one 
man's vision and heart and genius. He had 
faithful helpers, capable coadjutors. One can- 
not make comparisons among them, but one of 
these lieutenants was so long in the work, so 
effective, so devoted, so regardless of personal 
sacrifice of means and career and health, that 
we can mention his name without hesitation as 
the one to whom, next to the Chief, the men of 
the C. R. B. and the people of Belgium and 
France turned, and never in vain, for the in- 
spiration that never let hope die. This is Wil- 
liam Babcock Poland, like his chief an engineer 
of world-wide experience, who served first as 
assistant director in Belgium, then as director 
there, and, finally, after Hoover came to 
America to be its food administrator, director, 
with headquarters in London, for all the work 
in Europe. 

In April, 1917, America entered the war, 
and Minister Whitlock came out of Belgium 
with his shepherded flock of American consuls 
and relief workers, although a small group of 
C. R. B. men, with the director, Prentis Gray, 

197 



HERBERT HOOVER 

remained inside for several weeks longer. In 
the same month Herbert Hoover heard his 
next call to war service. For almost immedi- 
ately after our entrance into the war President 
Wilson asked him to come to Washington to 
consult about the food situation. This consul- 
tation was the beginning of American food ad- 
ministration. It did not end Belgian relief for 
Hoover, for the work had still to go on and 
did go on through all the rest of the war and 
even for several months of the Armistice 
period, with the C. R. B. and its Chief still in 
charge, although Dutch and Spanish neutrals 
replaced the Americans inside the occupied 
territory. But the new call was to place a new 
duty and responsibility on Hoover's broad 
shoulders. Responding to it, he arrived in 
New York on the morning of May 3, 1917, and 
reached Washington the evening of the same 
day. On the following day he talked with the 
President and began planning for the adminis- 
tration of American food. 



CHAPTER X 

AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION: PRINCIPLES, 
CONSERVATION, CONTROL OF EXPORTS 

Put yourself in Hoover's place when the 
President called him back from the Belgian 
relief work to be the Food Administrator of 
the United States. Here were a hundred mil- 
lion people unaccustomed to government in- 
terference with their personal affairs, above all 
of their affairs of stomach and pocketbook, 
their affairs of personal habit and private busi- 
ness. What would you think of your chance 
to last long as a new kind of government of- 
ficial, set up in defiance of all American prece- 
dent and tradition of personal liberty, to say 
how much and what kinds of food the people 
were to eat and how the business affairs of all 
millers and bakers, all commission men and 
wholesale grocers and all food manufacturers 
were to be run ? 

199 



HERBERT HOOVER 

The stomach and private business of Ameri- 
cans are the seats of unusually many and deli- 
cate nerve-endings. To hit the American 
household in the stomach and the American 
business man in the pocketbook is to invite a 
prompt, violent and painful reaction. Yet this 
is what President Wilson asked Hoover to do 
and to face. 

Hoover realized the full possibilities of the 
situation. He had seen the rapid succession of 
the food dictators in each of the European 
countries; their average duration of life — as 
food dictators — was a little less than six 
months. "I don't want to be food dictator for 
the American people," he said, plaintively, a 
few days after the President had announced 
what he wanted him to do. "The man who ac- 
cepts such a job will lie on the barbed wire of 
the first line of intrenchments." 

But besides trying to put yourself in Hoov- 
er's place, try also to put yourself again in 
your own place in those great days of Ameri- 
ca's first entry into the war, and you will get 
another, and a less terrifying, view of the 
situation. Remember your feelings of those 

200 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

days as a per- fervid patriotic American, not 
only ready but eager to play your part in your 
country's cause. Some of you could carry 
arms ; some could lend sons to the khaki ranks 
and daughters to the Red Cross uniform. 
Some could go to Washington for a dollar a 
year. Yet many could, for one sufficient rea- 
son or another, do none of these things. But 
all could help dig trenches at home right 
through the kitchen and dining-room. You 
could help save food if food was to help win 
the war. You could help remodel temporarily 
the whole food business and food use of the 
country to the great advantage of America 
and the Allies in their struggle for victory. 

Well, Hoover put himself both in your place 
and in his own place. And he thought that 
the food of America could be administered — 
not dictated — successfully, if we would try to 
do it in a way consonant with the genius of 
American people. Hoover had had in his Bel- 
gian relief work an experience with the heart 
of America. He knew he could rely on it. He 
also believed he could rely on the brain of 
America. 

201 



HERBERT HOOVER 

So he put the matter of food control fairly 
and squarely up to the people. He asked them 
to make the fundamental decisions. He 
showed them the need and the way to meet it, 
and asked them to follow him. He depended 
on the reasoned mass consent and action of 
the nation, the truly democratic decision of the 
country on a question put openly and clearly 
before it. It could choose to do or not do. The 
deciding was really with it. If it saw as he did 
it would act with him. 

He was to be no food dictator, as the Ger- 
man food-minister was, nor even a food con- 
troller as the English food-minister was of- 
ficially named. He was to be a food adminis- 
trator for the people, in response to its needs 
and desire for making wise food management 
help in winning the war. So while the food 
controllers of the European countries relied 
chiefly on government regulation to effect the 
necessary food conservation and control, the 
American food administrator trusted chiefly to 
direct appeal to the people and their voluntary 
response. 

And the response came. Even where 
202 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

governmental regulation seemed necessary, 
as it did especially in relation to trade 
and manufacturing practices, he attempted 
to have it accepted by voluntary agree- 
ment of the groups most immediately con- 
cerned before announcing or enforcing it. To 
do this he held conference after conference 
in Washington with groups of from a score 
to several hundreds of men representing per- 
sonally, and in addition sometimes by appoint- 
ment from organized food-trade or food-pro- 
ducing groups, the point of view of those most 
affected by the proposed regulation. He ex- 
plained to these men the needs of the nation, 
stud their special opportunities and duties to 
serve these needs. He put their self-interest 
and the interests of their country side by side 
in front of them. He showed them that the 
decision of the war did not rest alone with the 
men in the trenches : that there were service and 
sacrifice to render at home in shops and stores 
and counting rooms as well as on the fighting 
lines. He debated methods and probable re- 
sults with them. He laid all his cards on the 
table and, almost always, he won. He won 

203 



HERBERT HOOVER 

their confidence in his fairness, their admira- 
tion for his knowledge and resourcefulness and 
their respect for his devotion to the national 
cause. 

But he knew always that he was playing 
with dynamite. He could not see or talk to 
everybody at once, and the news that ran 
swiftly over the country about what the Food 
Administration was doing or going to do was 
not always the truth, but it always got listened 
to. And the first reaction to it was likely to 
be one of indignant opposition. This was well 
expressed by the cartoon of black Matilda in 
the kitchen: "Mistah Hoover goin' to show me 
how to cook cawn pone? Well, I reckin not." 
So with the business man. But the second re- 
action, the one that came after listening to 
Hoover and thinking about the matter over- 
night, was different. 

I remember a group of large buyers and 
sellers of grain, men who dealt on the grain 
exchanges of the Middle West, who came to 
Washington, not at his request but on their 
own determination to have it out with this man 
who was threatening to interfere seriously with 

204. 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

their affairs; indeed, who threatened to put 
many of them out of business for the period of 
the war. They came with big sticks. They 
met in the morning for conference with the ob- 
ject of their wrath. Then they went off and 
met in the afternoon together. They came the 
next morning for another conference. And 
they met again alone to pass some resolutions. 
The resolutions commended the Food Admin- 
istrator for the regulations he was about to put 
into force, and recommended that they be made 
more drastic than he had originally suggested ! 
But among the hundred million people of 
the United States there were some who did not 
justify Hoover's belief in American patriot- 
ism and American heart. Just as there were 
some among the seven million Belgians who 
tried to cheat their benefactors and their coun- 
trymen by forging extra ration cards. So when 
a measure to regulate some great food trade or 
industry, as the wholesale grocery business or 
milling, was agreed to and honestly lived up 
to by eighty-five or ninety per cent of the men 
concerned, and for these could have been left 
on a wholly voluntary basis, there were a few 

205 



HERBERT HOOVER 

for whom the regulations had to be legally 
formulated and energetically enforced. They 
were the ones who made the reluctant gifts to 
the American Red Cross, which was the Food 
Administrator's favorite form of penalization, 
when he did not have to go to the extreme of 
putting persistent profiteers out of business. 

The Food Control Law, passed by Congress 
in August, 1917, under which the Food Ad- 
ministrator, acting for the President, derived 
his authority, was a perfectly real law, but it 
left great gaps in the control. For example, 
it exempted from its license regulations, which 
were the chief means of direct legal control, all 
food producers (farmers, stock-growers, et al.) 
and all retailers doing a. business of less than 
$100,000 a. year. It did not give any authority 
for a direct fixing of maximum prices. It. car- 
ried comparatively few penalty provisions. 
But it did provide authority for three primary 
agencies of control: First, the licensing of all 
food manufacturers, jobbers, and wholesalers, 
and of retailers doing business of more than 
$100,000 annually, with the prescription of 
regulations which the licensees should observe ; 

206 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

second, the purchase and sale of foodstuffs by 
the Government; and, third, the legal enter- 
ing into agreements with food producers, 
manufacturers or distributors, which if made 
only between the members of these groups 
themselves would have been violations of the 
anti-trust laws. All of these powers con- 
tributed their share to the success of what was 
one of the most important features of the food 
control and one to which Hoover devoted most 
determined and continuous effort, namely, the 
radical cutting out, or at least, down, of specu- 
lative and middleman profits. But with the 
limited authority of the Food Administrator it 
was only through the voluntary cooperation of 
the people and food trades that these three 
kinds of powers were made really effective. 

The most conspicuous features of the volun- 
tary cooperation which Hoover was able to ob- 
tain from the people and the food-trades by 
his conferences, his organization of the states, 
and his great popular propaganda, were those 
connected with what was called "food conser- 
vation," by which was meant a general econ- 
omy in food use, an elimination of waste, and 

207 



HERBERT HOOVER 

an actual temporary modification of national 
food habits by an increased use of fish and 
vegetable proteins and fats and lessened use 
of meat and animal fats, a considerable substi- 
tution of corn and other grains for wheat, and 
the general use of a wheat flour containing in 
it much more of the total substance of the 
wheat grain than is contained in the usual "pat- 
ent" flour. 

It was with the great campaign for food con- 
servation, too, that the Food Administration 
really started its work, beginning it as volun- 
tary and unofficial war service. For although 
consideration of the Food Control Act began 
before the House Committee on Agriculture 
about April 21, it was not until August 10 that 
the bill became a law. On the same day, the 
President issued an Executive Order establish- 
ing a United States Food Administration and 
appointing Herbert Hoover to be United 
States Food Administrator. Hoover accepted 
the appointment with the proviso that he should 
receive no salary and that he should be allowed 
to build up a staff on the same volunteer basis. 

But long before this, indeed immediately 
208 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

after the May consultation with Hoover for 
which he had been asked to come from Europe 
to Washington, President Wilson had an- 
nounced a tentative program of stimulation of 
food production and conservation of food sup- 
ply. The need was urgent, and the country 
could not wait for Congressional action. There 
was really a war on and there was an impera- 
tive need of fighting, and fighting immediately 
and hard in all the various and unusual ways 
in which modern war is fought. One of these 
ways which the President recognized and which 
Hoover, by virtue of his illuminating experi- 
ence in Europe, knew as no other American 
did, was the food way. The President wanted 
something started. So again, just as at 
the beginning of the Belgian relief work 
in October, 1914, Hoover found himself 
in the position of being asked to begin 
work without the necessary support behind 
him ; in the Belgian case he lacked money, in 
the present case he lacked authority. But in 
both cases action was needed at once and in 
both cases Hoover got action. He is a devotee 
of action. 

209 



HERBERT HOOVER 

Thus, before there was an official food ad- 
ministration there was an unofficial beginning 
of what became the food administration's most 
characteristic and most widely known under- 
taking, its campaign for food conservation. It 
was the most characteristic, for it depended for 
success entirely on popular consent and pa- 
triotic response. It was the most widely 
known, for it touched every home and house- 
wife, every man and child at the daily sitting 
down at table. In planning and beginning it 
Hoover had the special assistance of his old- 
time college chum and lifelong friend, Presi- 
dent Ray Lyman Wilbur, of Stanford Univer- 
sity, who brought to this particular undertak- 
ing* a far-reaching vision, a convinced belief in 
democratic possibilities, and a constructive 
mind of unusual order. 

It is well not to forget that the first appeal 
for food-saving was made primarily to the 
Women of the land. And theirs was the first 
great response. From the very first days, in 
May, of general discussion in the press of the 
certain need of food-saving in America if the 
Allies were to be provided with sufficient sup- 

210 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

plies to maintain their armies and civilian popu 
lations in the health, strength, and confidence 
necessary to the fullest development of their 
war strength, the voluntary offers of assistance 
from women and women's organizations, and 
inquiries about how best to give it, had been 
pouring into Hoover's temporary offices in 
Washington. And through all of the Food 
Administration work the women of America 
played a conspicuous part, both as heads of 
divisions in the Washington and State offices 
and as uncounted official and unofficial helpers 
in county and town organizations and in the 
households of the country. 

The picturesque details of the great cam- 
paign for food conservation and its results on 
the intimate habits of the people are too fresh 
in the memories of us all to need repeating 
here. A whole-hearted cooperation by the press 
of the country; an avalanche of public appeal 
and advice by placards, posters, motion pic- 
tures, and speakers; an active support by 
churches, fraternal organizations, colleges and 
schools ; the remodeling of the service of hotels, 
restaurants and dining-cars ; and a pledging of 

211 



HERBERT HOOVER 

twelve out of the twenty million households 
of the country to follow the requests and sug- 
gestions of the Food Administration, result- 
ing in wheatless and meatless meals, limited 
sugar and butter, the "clean plate," and strict 
attention to reducing all household waste of 
food — all these are the well-remembered hap- 
penings of yesterday. The results gave the 
answer, Yes, to Hoover's oft-repeated ques- 
tions to the nation : Can we not do as a democ- 
racy what Germany is doing as an autocracy? 
Can we not do it better? 

These results are impossible to measure by 
mere statistics. Figures cannot express the 
satisfied consciences, the education in wise and 
economical food use, and the feeling of a daily 
participation by all of the people in per- 
sonally helping to win the war, which was a 
psychological contribution of great impor- 
tance to the Government's efforts to put the 
whole strength of the nation into the struggle. 
Nor can the results to the Allies be measured 
in figures. But their significance can be sug- 
gested by the contents of a cablegram which 
Lord Rhondda, the English Food Controller, 

212 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

sent to Hoover in January, 1918. This cable, 
in part, was as follows : 

"Unless you are able to send the Allies at 
least 75,000,000 bushels of wheat over and 
above what you have exported up to January 
first, and in addition to the total exportable 
surplus from Canada, I cannot take the respon- 
sibility of assuring our people that there will 
be food enough to win the war. Imperative 
necessity compels me to cable you in this blunt 
way. No one knows better than I that the 
American people, regardless of national and 
individual sacrifice, have so far refused nothing 
that is needed for the war, but it now lies with 
America to decide whether or not the Allies in 
Europe shall have enough bread to hold out 
until the United States is able to throw its force 
into the field. ..." 

I remember very well the thrill and the shock 
that ran through the Food Administration 
staff when that cable came. It seemed as if no 
more could be done than was already being 
done. The breathless question was: Could 
Hoover do the impossible? I suppose his 
question to himself was: Could the American 

213 



HERBERT HOOVER 

people do it? He did not hesitate either in his 
belief or his action. His prompt reply was : 

"We will export every grain that the Ameri- 
can people save from their normal consump- 
tion. We believe our people will not fail to 
meet the emergency." 

He then appealed to the people to intensify 
their conservation of wheat. The President 
issued a special proclamation to the same end. 
The wheat was saved and sent — and the threat- 
ened breakdown of the Allied war effort was 
averted. 

Hoover felt justified in July, 1918, in 
making an attempt to indicate the results of 
food conservation during the preceding twelve 
months by analyzing the statistics of food ex- 
ports he had been able to make to the Allies. 
It was, of course, primarily for the sake of pro- 
viding this indispensable food support to the 
Allies that food conservation was so earnestly 
pushed. The control of these exports and 
the elimination of speculative profits and the 
stabilization of prices in connection with home 
purchases were the special features in the gen- 

214 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

eral program of food administration that were 
pushed primarily for the sake of our own peo- 
ple. 

In a formal report by letter to the President 
on July 18, 1918, Hoover showed that the ex- 
ports of meats, fats and dairy products in the 
past twelve months had been about twice as 
much as the*average for the years just preced- 
ing the war, and fifty per cent more than in the 
year July, 1916 — June, 1917. Of cereals and 
cereal products our shipments to the Allies 
were a third more than in the year July, 1916 — 
June, 191T. 

"It is interesting to note," writes the Food 
Administrator, "that since the urgent request 
of the Allied food controllers early in the year 
for a further shipment of 75,000,000 bushels 
from our 1917 wheat than originally planned, 
we shall have shipped to Europe, or have en 
route, nearly 85,000,000 bushels. At the time 
of this request our surplus was more than ex- 
hausted. The accomplishment of our people 
in this matter stands out even more clearly if 
we bear in mind that we had available in the 
fiscal year 1916-17 from net carry-over and 
as surplus over our normal consumption about 

215 



HERBERT HOOVER 

200,000,000 bushels of wheat which we were 
able to export that year without trenching on 
our home loaf. This last year, however, owing 
to the large failure of the 1917 wheat crop, we 
had available from net carry-over and produc- 
tion and imports only just about our normal 
consumption. Therefore our wheat shipments 
to allied destinations represent approximately 
savings from our own wheat bread. 

"These figures, however, do not fully convey 
the volume of the effort and sacrifice made dur- 
ing the past year by the whole American peo- 
ple. Despite the magnificent effort of our 
agricultural population in planting a much in- 
creased acreage in 1917, not only was there a 
very large failure in wheat but also, the corn 
failed to mature properly and our corn is our 
dominant crop. We calculate that the total 
nutritional production of the country for the 
fiscal year just closed was between seven per 
cent and nine per cent below the average of 
the three previous years, our nutritional sur- 
plus for export in those years being about the 
same amount as the shrinkage last year. 
Therefore the consumption and waste of food 
have been greatly reduced in every direction 
during the war. 

"I am sure that all the millions of our peo- 
ple, agricultural as well as urban, who have 

216 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

contributed to these results should feel a very 
definite satisfaction that in a year of universal 
food shortages in the northern hemisphere all 
of those people joined together against Ger- 
many have come through into sight of the com- 
ing harvest not only with health and strength 
fully maintained, but with only temporary 
periods of hardship. The European allies have 
been compelled to sacrifice more than our own 
people but we have not failed to load every 
steamer since the delays of the storm months 
last winter. Our contributions to this end could 
not have been accomplished without effort and 
sacrifice, and it is a matter for further satis- 
faction that it has been accomplished voluntar- 
ily and individually. It is difficult to distin- 
guish between various sections of our people — 
the homes, public-eating places, food trades, 
urban or agricultural populations — in assess- 
ing credit for these results; but no one will 
deny the dominant part played by the Ameri- 
can women." 

The conservation part of the Food Adminis- 
tration's work was picturesque, conspicuous 
and important. But it was, of course, only 
one among the many of the Administration's 
activities. On the day of his appointment 

217 



HERBERT HOOVER 

Hoover outlined his conception of the func- 
tions and aims of the Food Administration, as 
follows : 

"The hopes of the Food Administration are 
three-fold. First, to so guide the trade in the 
fundamental food commodities as to eliminate 
vicious speculation, extortion and wasteful 
practices and to stabilize prices in the essential 
staples. Second, to guard our exports so that 
against the world's shortage, we retain suf- 
ficient supplies for our own people and to co- 
operate with the Allies to prevent inflation in 
prices. And, third, that we stimulate in every 
manner within our power the saving of our 
food in order that we may increase exports to 
our Allies to a point which will enable 
them to properly provision their armies 
and to feed their peoples during the coming 
winter. 

"The Food Administration is called into be- 
ing to stabilize and not to disturb conditions 
and to defend honest enterprise against illegiti- 
mate competition. It has been devised to cor- 
rect the abnormalities and abuses that have 
crept into trade by reason of the world dis- 

218 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

turbance and to restore business as far as may 
be to a reasonable basis. 

"The business men of this country, I am con- 
vinced, as a result of hundreds of conferences 
with representatives of the great forces of food 
supply, realize their own patriotic obligation 
and the solemnity of the situation, and will 
fairly and generously cooperate in meeting the 
national emergency. I do not believe that dras- 
tic force need be applied to maintain economic 
distribution and sane use of supplies by the 
great majority of American people, and I have 
learned a deep and abiding faith in the intelli- 
gence of the average American business man 
whose aid we anticipate and depend on to rem- 
edy the evils developed by the war which he 
admits and deplores as deeply as ourselves. 
But if there be those who expect to exploit this 
hour of sacrifice, if there are men or organiza- 
tions scheming to increase the trials of this 
country, we shall not hesitate to apply to the 
full the drastic, coercive powers that Congress 
has conferred upon us in this instrument." 

From the beginning of the war the food 
necessities of the Allies and European neutrals 

219 



HERBERT HOOVER 

had led them to make the most violent exer- 
tions to meet their needs, and these exertions 
were intensified as the war went on. Food was 
war material. It existed in America and was 
imperatively demanded in Europe. By any 
means possible, without regard to price or dan- 
gerous drainage away from us Europe meant 
to have it. Hoover early saw the danger to 
America in this. Things had to be balanced. 
We were ready to exert every effort to supply 
the Allies every pound of food we could afford 
to let go out of the country, but there was a 
limit, a danger-line. Hoover could not trust 
to appeal to the European countries to regard 
this danger; they were in a state of panic. It 
required recourse to legal regulation. There 
was necessary an effective control of exports. 
Without such control the tremendous pressure 
of demand from the European countries, with 
the sky-rocketing of prices incident to it would 
have broken down the whole fabric of Hoov- 
er's measures for guarding the food needs of 
our own people and of stabilizing prices and 
preventing an actual food panic and conse- 
quent industrial break-down in our country at 

220 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

a moment when we were calling on our indus- 
tries and our people as a whole for their great- 
est efforts. 

The Food Law alone was not sufficient to 
give Hoover the strength he needed for this 
control. But casting about for assistance he 
formed a close working alliance between the 
Food Administration and the War Trade and 
Shipping Boards to effect the needed regula- 
tion. The combination had the power to es- 
tablish an absolutely effective control of ex- 
ports and imports. Not a pound of food could 
be sent out of the country without the consent 
of the Food Administration. 

Growing out of this export control and 
really including it, was the wider function of 
the centralization and coordination of pur- 
chases not only for the Allies and Neutrals but 
in connection with the buying agencies of our 
Army, Navy, Red Cross, and other large phil- 
anthropic organizations. Under the pressure 
of the need for food control, the foreign gov- 
ernments had taken over almost completely, 
early in the war, the purchases of outside food- 
stuffs for their peoples, and the Allies had so 

221 



HERBERT HOOVER 

closely associated themselves in this undertak- 
ing that they had it in their power, if they cared 
to use it, to dominate prices to the American 
farmer. Hoover very early saw the advisa- 
bility of an American centralization of the pur- 
chases for foreign export as an offset to this 
danger. He further recognized in such a co- 
ordinating centralization the possibilities of 
much good in the stimulation of production 
and stabilization of home prices. A Division 
of Coordination of Purchase was therefore for- 
mally set up about November 1, 1917, under 
the efficient direction of F. S. Snyder. 

In a memorandum dated November 19, the 
Food Administrator stated that he considered 
it vital to the general welfare that all large pur- 
chases of certain commodities should be made 
by plans of allocation among food suppliers at 
fair and just prices, "the efforts of the Federal 
Trade Commission to be directed to see that 
costs are not inflated." The memorandum fur- 
ther stated that all allotment plans between 
Allied countries and the food industries should 
be entered into with the Allied Provisions Ex- 
port Commission through the Division of Co- 

222 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

ordination of Purchase ; and that all estimated 
and specific requirements of food products of 
all characters for the Allied countries should be 
furnished the Division of Coordination of Pur- 
chase by the Allied Provisions Export Com- 
mission and that such requirements shall bear 
the approval of the Allied Provisions Export 
Commission. Also, that on the question of is- 
suing licenses for the exporting of the pur- 
chases, the approval to export will be arranged 
by the Food Administration's Division of Co- 
ordination of Purchase, and the War Trade 
Board; and the final action taken on each re- 
quirement shall have the approval of the head 
of the Division of Coordination of Purchase. 

The general plan outlined in this memoran- 
dum was the one followed. The Allied Pro- 
visions Export Commission acted as the buying 
agency for the Allies and informed the Division 
of Coordination of Purchase of the Food Ad- 
ministration of the requirements of the Allies ; 
the Food Purchase Board acted as the recom- 
mending buying agency for the Army and 
Navy and gave the Food Administration the 
necessary information as to the requirements 

223 



HERBERT HOOVER 

of these agencies. Grains and grain products 
were not included in this scheme of buying for 
the Allies, as this buying was done through the 
Food Administration Grain Corporation. 

The Allied purchasing was therefore com- 
pletely controlled. The license to export was 
not issued by the War Trade Board until the 
application for the same had been approved 
by the Food Administration, and this approval 
would not be given if the rules of its Division 
of Coordination of Purchase had not been 
followed. It should be noted that the Food 
Administration did not actually complete the 
transaction of purchase and sale for any of 
the commodities. Its function was completed 
when buyer and seller had been brought to- 
gether and the terms of sale agreed upon and 
approved by it. The total volume of purchases 
of all supplies made under the coordination of 
the various agencies set up by the Food Ad- 
ministration aggregated over seven and a 
quarter billion dollars during the course of its 
existence. 






CHAPTER XI 

AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION; GENERAL 

REGULATION, CONTROL OF WHEAT AND PORK; 

ORGANIZATION IN THE STATES 

In attacking the problem of food control by 
enforced regulation Hoover frankly repeat- 
edly described his position as that of one who 
was choosing the lesser of two evils ; the other 
and greater one was that of having no regu- 
lation at all. Political economists and others 
called his attention constantly to the fact that 
the old reliable law of supply and demand 
would take care of his troubles if he would but 
let it. If, because of the great demand, high 
food prices prevailed, their prevalence would 
automatically solve the problem of food short- 
age. They would stimulate production and 
curtail consumption ; our people would buy less 
and there would be more of a surplus to send 
to the Allies. 

Hoover's answer was that unrestricted sky- 
225 



HERBERT HOOVER 

rocketing of prices would certainly curtail 
consumption, but it would be the consumption 
by the poor, the hosts of wage-earners and the 
small-salaried. It would not cut down con- 
sumption by the rich, and it would promptly 
lead to sharp class feeling, widespread popular 
dissatisfaction and resentment, even revolt. 
War time was no time to force any such situa- 
tion as this. 

The remedy offered by supply and demand 
was one which would only bring on another and 
worse illness. But Hoover realized and de- 
clared over and over again that even a neces- 
sary interference with the law of supply and 
demand was at best an evil. But it was less of 
an evil, under the circumstances, than not to in- 
terfere with it to some degree. These were not 
normal but abnormal times, and regulation by 
supply and demand is primarily a process for 
normal times. And it is a process that requires 
time to do its remedial work, and there was no 
time. 

But Hoover did not and does not believe in 
price-fixing or immediate government control 
of commerce where they can be avoided. In 

226 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

his statement before the Senate Committee on 
Agriculture in June, 1917, he said: 

"The food administrations of Europe and 
the powers that they possess are of the nature 
of dictatorship, but happily ours is not their 
plight. . . . The tendency there has been for 
the government to take over the functions of 
the middleman, first with one commodity and 
then with another, until in the extreme case 
of Germany practically all food commodities 
are taken directly by the government from the 
producers and allotted by an iron-clad system 
of ticket distribution to the consumer. The 
whole of the great distributing agencies, and 
the financial system which revolved around 
them, have been suspended for the war or de- 
stroyed for good. That is the system which 
is dictatorship, and which, so far as I can see, 
this country need never approach. 

"In distinction from this, our conception of 
the problem in the United States is that we 
should assemble the voluntary effort of the peo- 
ple, of the men who represent the great trades ; 
that we should, in effect, undertake with their 
cooperation the regulation of the distributing 
machinery of the country in such a manner that 
we may restore its function as nearly as may 

227 



HERBERT HOOVER 

be to a pre-war basis, and thus eliminate, so far 
as may be, the evils and failures which have 
sprung up. And, at the same time, we pro- 
pose to mobilize the spirit of self-denial and 
self-sacrifice in this country in order that we 
may reduce our national waste and our national 
expenditure." 

The primary basis of the commodity control, 
that is the control of the manufacture, whole- 
sale selling, storage, and distribution of food- 
stuffs lay in the licensing provisions of the 
Food Control law. Any handler of foods, not 
an immediate producer or a retailer whose 
gross sales did not exceed $100,000 a year, 
could be forced to carry on his business under 
license, and authority was provided to issue 
regulations prescribing just, reasonable, non- 
discriminatory and fair storage charges, com- 
missions, profits, and practices. This license 
control was the Food Administration's princi- 
pal means of enforcing provisions against all 
wasteful, unjust, and unreasonable charges 
and procedures. 

But it was far from easy to determine all at 
once either what trades and commodities should 

228 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

be taken under control or what kind and de- 
gree of control should be exercised. As Hoover 
said to the Senate Committee on Agriculture, 
using a metaphor springing from his engineer- 
ing experience : 

"It is impossible, in constructing routes and 
bridges through the forest of speculation and 
difficulty to describe in advance the route and 
detail of these roads and bridges which we must 
push forward from day to day into the un- 
known." 

And, referring again to the same matter in 
an address before the United States Chamber 
of Commerce in September, 1917, he said: 

"We shall find as' we go on with the war 
and its increasing economic disruption, that 
first one commodity then another will need to 
be taken under control. We shall, however, 
profit by experience if we lay down no hard 
and fast rules, but if we deal with each situa- 
tion on its merits. So long as demand and sup- 
ply have free play in a commodity we had best 
leave it alone. Our attention to the break in 
normal economic control in other commodities 

229 



HERBERT HOOVER 

must be designed to repair the break, not to 
set up new economic systems or theories." 

Hoover believed in making haste slowly. 
But he had to move. The crisis of the situation 
was upon us, the dike was already leaking and 
measures were demanded which would stop the 
leak before it became a flood. In the exigency 
there was no time for the Food Administrator 
to devise and carefully test plans suggested by 
'even the most favored theories of economists, if 
these plans offered remedies which would only 
be available in an indeterminate future. The 
scope of the war had disorganized the life and 
practices of the whole world, had overthrown 
all precedents, shattered all fundamental re- 
lations. And on nothing was its disturbing 
influence upon the normal more potent than in 
relation to food supply. 

The means of control by license regulations 
adopted by the Food Administration were 
many and various. From the beginning the 
stocks of manufacturers and dealers were lim- 
ited, so that a continuous and even distribution 
might prevent shortage and high prices; con- 

230 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

tracts for future delivery were limited again 
to secure an equal distribution and lessen the 
possibilitj^ of speculative profits from the rising 
market. Wasteful and expensive practices 
were forbidden. All these means were cap- 
able of rather definite application. But a 
greater difficulty came in the equally important 
and necessary work of limiting profits and se- 
curing a more direct distribution from manu- 
facturer and large food handler to consumer. 

The many regulations and the varying ac- 
tivities necessary to achieve these needs were 
mostly looked after by a Division of Distribu- 
tion and certain allied divisions, devoting their 
attention to special groups of commodities. 
The principal division was under the immedi- 
ate direction of Theodore Whitmarsh, one of 
the most vigorous and able of Hoover's vol- 
unteer helpers. Under Hoover's direction 
Whitmarsh and his associates at the head of 
the special commodity divisions worked out the 
manifold details of a regulatory system which 
was gradually extended to a most varied as- 
sortment of foodstuffs, trades and manufac- 
tures. 

231 



HERBERT HOOVER 

At the end of 1918 over 250,000 food-hand- 
ling corporations, firms, and individuals were 
under Food Administration licenses. Meat, 
fish, poultry, eggs, butter, milk, potatoes, 
fresh and dried vegetables, and fruits, canned 
goods, the coarse grains and rice, vegetable 
oils, coffee, and such various commodities ac- 
cessory to food-handling, as ice, ammonia (for 
ice-making), arsenic (for insecticides), jute 
bags, sisal, etc., were under direct control to 
greater or less extent, except when in the 
hands of the actual producers and the ultimate 
retailers. And by the indirect means of a wide 
publicity of "fair prices," and by an influence 
exerted through the wholesalers, even the re- 
tailers were brought into some degree of agree- 
ment or control in connection with the Food 
Administration effort to eliminate unfair deal- 
ing and food profiteering. 

But more important than the control of any 
one of these many foods, or perhaps than of 
all of them together, and more discussed both 
in Food Administration days and since, was 
the control of wheat, and, as a part of it, of 
flour and bread. Some of the methods and 

232 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

results of food conservation as especially ap- 
plied to wheat have already been referred to, 
but here we are especially concerned with the 
methods of governmental control as applied to 
this grain. 

Hoover had learned in Belgium, and by his 
observation of the situation in England and 
[Europe, that the poetic expression that bread 
is the staff of life becomes endowed with an 
intense practical significance to the food con- 
trollers and the peoples in bread-eating coun- 
tries suffering from food-shortage. The loud- 
est call of hungry people, their primary anxi- 
ety and the first care of the food-controlling 
authorities all converge on wheat. The dietetic 
regime for a semi-starving people is strong or 
weak, appeasing or dangerous, in proportion 
'to the bread it contains. If the bread ration is 
normal or sufficient much repression can be 
used in the case of other foods. With bread 
there is life. The call of the Allies on America 
was for wheat above all else. More than one 
half of the normal dietary of France is com- 
posed of wheat bread. England normally uses 
less bread and more meat, but in the war time 

233 



HERBERT HOOVER 

she found she could lessen meat supply more 
safely than bread supply. It was for the pos< 
sible lack of 75,000,000 bushels of wheat that 
Lord Rhondda saw the defeat of the Allies 
staring him in the face. 

The government control of the American 
wheat as contrasted with its voluntary conser- 
vation, took many forms, touching it as grain, 
as flour, and as bread, as object of special 
stimulation for production, as prior commodity 
for transportation, and as export product. But 
curiously, that feature of its control for which 
the Food Administration has been most sub- 
ject to ill-considered criticism is one for which 
the Food Administration has the least respon- 
sibility; this is the government-established 
"fair price" to the grower. 

The Food Control Law as passed by Con- 
gress in August, 1917, contained a provision, 
guaranteeing a price of two dollars a bushel 
for the 1918 wheat crop. It was put in to 
stimulate production to insure the needed sup- 
ply for the war period. And it was intended 
to benefit the farmer. On the basis of this the 
Government would presumably be able, by 

234 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

proper regulation of the food handlers and 
commercial practices intermediate between the 
producer and consumer, both to assure the 
farmers of a good price and the consumer of 
not being driven to panic and revolt by an im- 
possible cost of his daily bread. That such a 
regulation was absolutely and immediately 
necessary was obvious from the fact that at the 
very time the Food Administration was being 
organized unofficially along the lines of con- 
servation propaganda in May, 1917, wheat was 
selling in Chicago at $3.25 a bushel and the 
consumer was paying for his bread on that 
basis, although the official estimate of the De- 
partment of Agriculture of the average price 
actually received by the farmer for his crop 
was but $1.44 a bushel. 

Congress had provided a government guar- 
antee only for the 1918 crop. At the time of 
the organization of the Food Administration 
the 1917 crop was on the point of coming to 
market. It seemed highly desirable for the 
sake of the farmers to insure their receipt of a 
fair price for this crop, also. Therefore the 
President appointed a committee composed of 

235 



HERBERT HOOVER 

representatives of leading farmers' and con- 

/sumers' organizations together with a number 
of agricultural experts from the agricultural 
colleges of the country under the chairmanship 
of President H. H. Garfield of Williams Col- 
lege, later U. S. Fuel Administrator, to fix 
on a "fair price" for the 1917 crop. The Food 
Administrator, as publicly announced by 
President Wilson at the time, took "no part 
in the deliberations of the committee" nor "in 
any way intimated an opinion regarding that 
price." 

The Committee in view of the fact that the 
price for 1918 wheat was already guaranteed 
at $2.00 — it was later increased by the Presi- 
dent to $2.26 — and that any smaller price 
would undoubtedly lead to a considerable hold- 
ing over of 1917 wheat for sale at the 1918 
price and that a higher price would have been 
dangerously unfair to the consumers, espe- 
cially the great body of working men, recom- 
mended a "fair price" of $2.20 a bushel 
for 1917 wheat. It was a price a little 
higher than that guaranteed by Eng- 
land to its farmers, abo^.t the same as that 

236 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

adopted by Germany, and a little less than 
that guaranteed by France, so desperate that 
she was ready to pay anything for production, 
and was already forestalling the complaint of 
consumers by subsidizing the bread. The Presi- 
dent adopted the price as recommended to him 
by the Committee, but there was no Congres- 
sional guarantee to back it up. So, with the 
fair price thus determined by an independent 
commission, the Food Administrator pro- 
ceeded with plans for holding the price of wheat 
at this level and reflecting it to the farmer. 
The principal steps taken to effect this were: 

First, the creation of a government corpora- 
tion (the U. S. Grain Corporation) which, 
acting under the provision of the Food Control 
Law authorizing the government to buy and 
sell foodstuffs, could deal in wheat and exert 
its influence in the maintenance of the fair price 
by acting as a dominant commercial agency for 
the buying, selling, and distribution of wheat. 

Second, the licensing of all store handlers 
and millers of wheat and controlling them both 
through voluntary agreements and license 
regulations. 

237 



HERBERT HOOVER 

Third, the prohibition of trading in futures. 

As an illustration of the results quickly ob- 
tained by these measures we may note that 
while the farmer was getting in the year just 
before the war about 27 per cent of the cost of 
each loaf of bread for the wheat in it, to which 
the miller added about 6% per cent and the 
middlemen, and bakers the remaining 66%> per 
cent, and, in 1915, after the war began, the re- 
spective proportions were 30 per cent, 11 per 
cent, and 59 per cent, in 1918, after the Food 
Administrator's control was in force, the far- 
mer got 40 per cent, the miller 3 per cent, and 
the others 57 per cent. Or, as another illustra- 
tion, while in 1917, when there was no food 
control the difference between the price of the 
farmers' wheat and the flour made from it was 
$11.00 per barrel this margin during Food 
Administration days was about $3.50. 

An enumeration of the many and ingenious 
measures adopted by Hoover and Julius 
Barnes, the self-sacrificing and highly efficient 
head of the Grain Corporation, to acquit them- 
selves and the Government with fairness to all 
interests of the tremendous responsibility and 

238 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

undertaking thus imposed on them would 
carry us beyond the limits of our space. These 
controllers of the American wheat had in their 
hands the fate of nations. The Allies had to 
be supplied; and the American farmers had 
to be stimulated to top effort ; and the Ameri- 
can consumers, which means the whole people, 
had to be kept uninjured in working efficiency 
and undismayed by possibility of food panic 
which would result from prohibitive prices, or 
actual shortage. If the war was to be won 
there simply had to be wheat enough for all, 
America and Allies alike, and it had to be 
available both as regards distribution and 
price. 

The results of the American wheat control 
can be summed up in one word : success. The 
unwearying labors and undiminished devotion 
necessary to achieve this success in face of great 
difficulties and much criticism cannot be so 
readily summed up. But without them the 
history of the war would have been a different 
history. We should never forget this. In the 
records of the methods and results of the con- 
trol lies the matter, all ready for the competent 

239 



HERBERT HOOVER 

pen, for an epic of the wheat, the fit third part 
of the trilogy that Frank Norris began with 
"The Octopus" and "The Pit" and had, at the 
call of death, to leave unwritten. 

Another phase of Hoover's food regulatory 
activity, concerning which there was, and still 
continues to be, much discussion, is that of his 
attempt to insure a stimulated production of 
hogs by a stabilized price which should well 
reward the grower and yet not lead to such an 
exorbitant cost to the consumer as would have 
been a dangerous hardship to our own people 
and an unfair hold-up of our associates in the 
war. Next to wheat, pork products were the 
American food supplies most necessary to the 
Allies. 

Hogs are a corn product. The cost of pro- 
duction of hogs depends rather more upon the 
price of corn than upon any other factor. In- 
vestigation showed that owing to the violent 
fluctuations in demand for corn and hogs dur- 
ing the war, there had been five periods between 
the beginning of the war and September, 1917, 
in which it had been more profitable to sell corn 
than to feed it to swine at the price of hogs then 

240 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

prevailing, while there were only three periods 
when the reverse was true. In the preceding 
eight years there had been only two periods in 
which the direct sale of, corn was more profit- 
able than feeding it to swine. 

The results of these periods of unprofit ble 
feeding was to retard hog production, as the 
grower was discouraged from breeding during 
those periods. Hoover therefore decided that 
the maintenance of a proper relation between 
the price of corn and the price of hogs was the 
best method of assuring an increased produc- 
tion of pork. Furthermore, the violent fluctua- 
tions in the price of hogs tended to lift the price 
of the pork products to the consumer unduly, 
for at every new rise the stocks already in the 
warehouses over the whole country were 
marked up and the spread between the con- 
sumer and the producer thereby increased. A 
stabilization of the price of hogs was therefore 
as necessary for the protection of the con- 
sumer for the sake of a reduction of this spread 
as it was in the case of other foodstuffs. 

In order that the swine growers should have 
an opportunity to participate in the determina- 

241 



HERBERT HOOVER 

tion of what method would be most fair and 
effective in establishing this stabilization and 
stimulating production, a committee of leading 
producers was asked to investigate the whole 
matter. This committee made a report late 
in October, 1917, which, after setting out the 
situation in detail and calling attention to the 
imperative need of a stimulation of produc- 
tion, declared that although hog production for 
the ten years ending 1916 had been maintained 
on a ratio of 11.66 bushels of corn to 100 
pounds of hog, there had been but little profit 
to the grower on this basis and that it would 
be desirable for the sake of stimulation to pay 
at least the equivalent of 13.33 bushels of 
corn per hundred pounds of average hog and, 
if possible, as much as 14.33 pounds. On this 
latter ratio the committee believed that produc- 
tion could be increased fifteen per cent above 
the normal. The Committee added an expres- 
sion of its belief that "the best emergency 
method of immediately stabilizing the market 
and preventing the premature marketing of 
light unfinished pigs and breeding stock would 
be to establish a minimum emergency price for 

242 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

good to select hogs of sixteen dollars a hundred 
pounds on the Chicago market." 

As the Food Administrator had no power 
to fix prices by law, nor to guarantee a price 
for the producer backed by money in the U. S. 
Treasury as in the case of the wheat guarantee, 
the only means available to him to assure a 
stable minimum price for hogs was to come to 
an agreement with the principal buyers both 
of hogs and the prepared pork products that 
they would pay a price which would make this 
minimum possible. This was accomplished by 
Hoover, with the approval of the President, 
in the following way: The Allies agreed with 
the United States that their purchases of food 
supplies would be made through the Food Ad- 
ministration (as already explained earlier in 
this book). They then agreed with the Food 
Administrator that their orders for pork and 
pork products might be placed with the pack- 
ers at prices which would enable the packers to 
buy the hogs offered them at not less than the 
minimum price agreed to between the Food 
Administrator and the producers. The orders 
for our Army and Navy, and for other large 

243 



HERBERT HOOVER 

buyers, such as the Belgian Relief and Red 
Cross, were also placed through the Food Ad- 
ministration upon the same price basis. The 
packers then agreed with the Food Adminis- 
tration that if these orders were placed with 
them at the stated prices they would pay to 
the producer the minimum price announced by 
the Food Administration. The combined or- 
ders of these principal buyers called for from 
thirty to forty per cent of the pork and pork 
products produced in the United States, and 
the price paid by them would obviously deter- 
mine the price for the whole amount. 

With this power, derived solely by agree- 
ment, and not, as many of the producers seemed 
to understand, or rather, misunderstand, by 
governmental authority exercised, as in the case 
of wheat, to establish a government-backed 
guarantee, the Food Administrator announced 
on November 3, 1917, that: 

"The prices (of hogs) so far as we can effect 
them will not go below a minimum of about 
$15.50 per hundredweight for the average of 
the packers' droves on the Chicago market un- 
til further notice. . . . We have had and shall 

244 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION] 

have the advice of a board composed of prac- 
tical hog-growers and experts. That board 
advises us that the best yardstick to measure 
the cost of production of hogs is the cost of 
corn. The board further advises that the ratio 
of corn price to hog price on the average over 
a series of years has been about twelve to one 
(or a little less). In the past when the ratio 
has gone lower than twelve to one, the stock of 
hogs in the country has decreased. When it 
was higher than twelve the hogs have increased. 
The board has given its judgment that to bring 
the stock of hogs back to normal under the 
present conditions the ratio should be about 
thirteen. Therefore, as to the hogs farrowed 
next spring, we will try to stabilize the price 
so that the farmer can count on getting for 
each one hundred pounds of hog ready for mar- 
ket, thirteen times the average cost per bushel 
of the corn fed to the hogs. . . . But let there 
be no misunderstanding of this statement. It 
is not a guarantee backed by money. It is 
not a promise by the packers. It is a state- 
ment of the intention and policy of the Food 
Administration which means to do justice to 
the farmer." 

The effect of Hoover's action to accomplish 
the imperatively needed stimulated production 

245 



HERBERT HOOVER 

of hogs began to appear by the next July and 
from that time on was very marked, the pro- 
duction reaching an increase over normal of 
thirty per cent. The price assured to the farm- 
ers by the Food Administration was main- 
tained uniformly from November, 1917, to 
August, 1918. In October, however, a critical 
situation arose because, by reason of the grow- 
ing peace talk, a sharp decline in the price of 
corn occurred and this decline spread fear 
among the growers that a similar reduction 
would take place in the price of hogs because 
of the fixed thirteen to one corn and hog ratio. 
A rapid marketing of hogs ensued which broke 
the price. 

With the Armistice there was an immediate 
change of attitude on the part of the Allies 
who had been trying to build up reserves of 
pork products to use in times of possible in- 
creased difficulty of transportation. They 
now moved promptly toward a reduction of 
purchases. This made serious difficulties in 
maintaining the price to the producers during 
the months of December, January, and Febru- 
ary. But Hoover's original assurance to the 

246 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

growers covered these months. It required 
most vigorous pressure on his part to compel 
the Allies to live up to their purchasing agree- 
ments. But he was finally successful in dis- 
posing of the material offered by the growers 
and thus was able to keep faith with them. 

Some criticism of the Food Administration 
because of this maintenance of prices was 
voiced by consumers. But two important 
things must be remembered in this connection. 
In the first place the stabilized price was estab- 
lished primarily for the sake of stimulating an 
imperatively needed increased production. In 
the second place the assurance of the Food Ad- 
ministration given to the growers in Novem- 
ber, 1917, that it would do what it could to 
maintain the price for hogs farrowed in the 
spring of 1918 covered sales extending to the 
spring of 1919. No one knew that an armistice 
would come in November, 1918. The only 
safe plan was to try to insure a food supply 
for a reasonably long time in advance. To 
have broken the agreement with the producers 
when the armistice came would have caused 
many of them great, even ruinous losses. Be- 

247 



HERBERT HOOVER 

sides it would have been a plain breach of 
faith. Hoover would not do it. 

In March, 1919, the War Trade Board was 
no longer willing to continue its export re- 
strictions. It was only by virtue of these that 
the Food Administration had any control of 
the situation. They were canceled and from 
that time on the market was uncontrolled. 
But by then, the major hog run was disposed 
of, and the Food Administration had acquitted 
itself of its obligation to the producers. 

This is a long and dry story of pigs and corn 
and difficulty. But I think it well to tell it, 
even though it may be dull, because it seems to 
be so little known. Hoover's situation vis a vis 
pigs and producers and packers in those 
strenuous days of threatened collapse of an all- 
important food supply seems to be too little 
understood. And this little understanding has 
resulted in too much unfair criticism. Now 
let us turn to another story with more humans 
than hogs in it. 

Hoover had said, in May, 1917, within 
a few days after the President had told 
him that he wanted him to administer the food 

248 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

of America, as a war measure: "I conceive that 
the essence of all special war administration 
falls into two phases: first, centralized and 
single responsibility ; second, delegation of this 
responsibility to decentralized administration." 

Then let us recall how soon after that we 
were all assuming some share in this "decen- 
tralized administration." If we had not all 
become Federal Food Administrators of states, 
or county, or city, or rural sub-food adminis- 
trators, or even members of food conservation 
committees or members of honor ration leagues, 
we were all at least, household food adminis- 
trators. We were all administering, in a new 
light and with a new aim, the food we bought 
or cooked or ate. Hoover, the centralized and 
responsible head, had decentralized food ad- 
ministration right down to each one of us. 

This decentralization began with an organi- 
zation of all the states. The general responsi- 
bility for this work was vested in a particular 
division of the Food Administration, directed 
by John W. Hallowell, a young engineer and 
business man who revealed a conspicuous ca- 
pacity in this important position. As early as 

249 



HERBERT HOOVER 

June, inquiry was made of Governors of the 
states and of other public officials and promi- 
nent men concerning desirable men who would 
be willing to volunteer their services in direct- 
ing the work of the Food Administration 
within their state, as their part in the war work 
of the nation. Early in July as many as had 
been so far selected came to Washington for a 
first conference with Hoover, at which plans 
were made for proceeding with the work within 
the states immediately upon the passage of the 
Food Control Act. By August 10 when the 
Food Administration was formally established, 
Federal Food Administrators were already se- 
lected for about half the states. The rest were 
soon chosen. Frequent meetings were held in 
Washington. 

At each successive conference with Hoover 
of these state administrators, who were able 
men, experienced in business administration or 
public service, their enthusiasm, their confi- 
dence in his leadership, their response to his na- 
tional ideals, their personal devotion to him, 
grew. Hoover's relation to them recalled to me, 
with leapings of the heart, those earlier days in 

250 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

Brussels when the eager young men of the C. 
R. B. used to come rushing in from the prov- 
inces to group themselves around him and de- 
rive fresh inspiration and determination from 
their contact with him to see the job through 
and to see it through cleanly and fearlessly. 

These Federal Food Administrators listened 
to Hoover in Washington as we listened to him 
in Belgium. He stirred their hearts and satis- 
fied their minds. And they went back to their 
difficult tasks, with fresh conviction and re- 
newed strength. And their tasks were truly 
difficult, their voluntarily assumed share of the 
decentralized administration was a serious one. 
But they, too, decentralized parts of the admin- 
istration; they set up the district and county 
and city administrations. And they and their 
many helpers were the ones who carried food 
administration into every market and grocery 
store and bakery and home. The whole coun- 
try, all the people, became a part of the United 
States Food Administration. 

And that was what Hoover wanted and in- 
tended. For he knew that only the people, all 
of them working voluntarily together, could 

251 



HERBERT HOOVER 

really administer the food of America, as it had 
to be administered in the great war emergency 
that had come to the country. 

On the day after the armistice Hoover ad- 
dressed the Federal Food Administrators, 
gathered in Washington, for the last time. In 
this address he outlined his attitude toward the 
future work of the Food Administration and, 
even more importantly, toward governmental 
food control as a policy, in the following words : 

"Our work under the Food Control Act has 
revolved largely around the curtailment of 
speculation and profiteering. This act will 
expire at the signing of the peace with Ger- 
many, and as it represents a type of legislation 
only justified under war conditions, I do not 
expect to see its renewal. It has proved of 
vital importance under the economic currents 
and psychology of war. I do not consider it 
as of such usefulness in the economic currents 
and psychology of peace. Furthermore, it is 
my belief that the tendency of all such legisla- 
tion, except in war, is to an over-degree to strike 
at the roots of individual initiative. We have 
secured its execution during the war as to the 
willing cooperation of ninety-five per cent of 

252 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

the trades of the country, but under peace con- 
ditions it would degenerate into an harassing 
blue law. 

"The law has well justified itself under war 
conditions. The investigations of our economic 
division clearly demonstrate that during the 
first year of the Food Administration farm 
prices steadily increased by fifteen per cent to 
twenty per cent on various computations, while 
wholesale prices decreased from three per cent 
to ten per cent, according to the basis of calcu- 
lation. Thus middlemen's cost and profits 
were greatly reduced. This was due to the 
large suppression of profiteering and specula- 
tion and to the more orderly trade practices in- 
troduced under the law. 

"It is my desire that we should all recognize 
that we have passed a great milestone in the 
signing of the armistice ; that we must get upon 
the path of peace ; that therefore we should be- 
gin at once to relax the regulation and control 
measures of the Food Administration at every 
point where they do not open a possibility of 
profiteering and speculation. This we cannot 
and will not permit so far as our abilities ex- 
tend until the last day that we have authority 
under the law. When we entered upon this 
work eighteen months ago our trades were ram- 
pant with speculation and profiteering. This 

253 



HERBERT HOOVER 

grew mainly from the utterly insensate raids 
of Europe on our commodities. I look now 
for a turn of American food trades towards 
conservative and safe business because in this 
period that confronts us, with the decreased 
buying power of our own people, of uncer- 
tainty as to the progress of the world's politics, 
with the Government in control of exports and 
imports, he would be a foolish man indeed who 
today started a speculation in food. This is 
a complete reversal of the commercial atmo- 
sphere that existed when war began eighteen 
months ago, and therefore the major necessity 
for law in repression of speculative activities 
is, to my mind, rapidly passing. It is our duty, 
however, to exert ourselves in every direction 
so to handle our food during reconstruction as 
to protect our producers and our consumers 
and to assure our trade from chaos and panic." 

On the same day that this address was made 
Hoover began the canceling of the Food Ad- 
ministration regulations, and this cancellation 
continued rapidly through November and De- 
cember. It had to be done with care to prevent 
dangerous disorganization, and some continued 
control was necessary during the winter and 
spring in order to carry out the agreements of 

254 



AMERICAN FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

price stabilization entered into between the 
Food Administration and the producers and 
handlers of certain commodities, as hogs, 
sugar, rice, and cotton seed and its products. 
The wheat price guarantee and control espe- 
cially provided for by Congress and later Presi- 
dential proclamation remained vested in the 
United States Grain Corporation. It will ex- 
pire on June 30, 1920. 

But Hoover could not remain in America 
to see this demobilization of the Food Admin- 
istration through personally. Only ten days 
after the armistice he left for Europe, at the 
request of the President, to direct the partici- 
pation of the United States in the imperatively 
needed relief of the war-ravaged countries of 
Eastern Europe. Edgar Rickard, who had 
been Hoover's chief personal assistant through 
all of the Food Administration work, was ap- 
pointed by the President as Acting Food Ad- 
ministrator in Hoover's absence. 



CHAPTER XII 

AMERICAN RELIEF ADMINISTRATION 

With the coming of the armistice victori- 
ous America and the Allies found themselves 
face to face with a terrible situation in Eastern 
Europe. The liberated peoples of the Baltic 
states, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Jugo-Slavia, 
and the Near East, were in a dreadful state of 
starvation and economic wreckage. A great 
responsibility and pressing duty devolved on 
America, Great Britain, France, and Italy to 
act promptly for the relief of these peoples who 
had become temporarily, by the hazards of war, 
their wards. But the Allies themselves were in 
no enviable position to relieve others. Their 
own troubles were many. It was on America 
that the major part of this relief work would 
fall. 

No man knew this situation, as far as it could 
be known before the veil of blockade and mili- 

256 



AMERICAN RELIEF ADMINISTRATION 

tary control was lifted from it, better than 
Hoover. And no man realized more clearly 
than he the direful consequences that it threat- 
ened not only to the peoples of the suffering 
countries themselves but to the peace and sta- 
bility of the world, to restore which every effort 
had now to be exerted. Hoover was not only 
the man logically indicated to the President of 
the United States to undertake this saving re- 
lief on the part of America, but he was the man 
whom all of Europe recognized as the source 
of hope in this critical moment. He came to 
the gigantic endeavor as the man of the hour. 

Hoover naturally made Paris his headquar- 
ters, for the Peace Conference was sitting here, 
and here also were the representatives of the 
Allies with whom he was to associate himself 
in the combined effort to save the peoples of 
Eastern Europe from starvation and help them 
make a beginning of self-government and eco- 
nomic rehabilitation. 

His first steps were directed toward: First, 
securing coordination with the Allied Govern- 
ments by setting up a council of the associated 
governments; second, finding the necessary 

257 



HERBERT HOOVER 

financial support from the United States for 
making the American contribution to this re- 
lief; third, setting up a special organization for 
the administration of the American food and 
funds; and, fourth, urging the provision of 
funds and shipping by the Allied Govern- 
ments. 

The special American organization for as- 
sisting in this general European relief was 
quickly organized urider the name of the 
American Relief Administration, of which 
Hoover was formally named by the President 
Director-General, and Congress on the recom- 
mendation of the President appropriated, on 
February 24, 1919, $100,000,000 as a working 
fund for the new organization. In addition to 
this the United States Treasury was already 
making monthly loans of several million dol- 
lars each to Roumania, Serbia, and Czecho- 
slovakia. But while waiting for the Congres- 
sional appropriation the work had to be got 
going, and for this the President contributed 
$5,000,000 from his special funds available for 
extraordinary expenses. 

Before actual relief work could be intelli- 
258 



AMERICAN RELIEF ADMINISTRATION" 

gently begun, however, it was necessary to find 
out by personal inspection just what the actual 
food situation in each of the Eastern European 
countries was, and for that purpose investigat- 
ing missions were sent out in December, 1918, 
and January, 1919, to all of the suffering coun- 
tries. 

Hoover had quickly gathered about him, as 
nucleus of a staff, a number of men already 
experienced in relief work and food matters 
who had worked with him in the Belgian relief 
and the American Food Administration. 
Others were rapidly added, both civilians of 
business or technical experience and army of- 
ficers, detached at his request, especially from 
the Quartermaster and Service of Supplies 
corps. From these men he was able to select 
small groups eager to begin with him the actual 
work. His own impatience and readiness to 
make a real start was like that of a race-horse 
at the starting gate or a runner with his toes on 
the line awaiting the pistol shot. 

The atmosphere of Paris was an irritating 
one. The men in control were always saying 
"wait." There were a thousand considerations 

259 



AMERICAN RELIEF ADMINISTRATION 

of old-time diplomacy, of present and future 
political and commercial considerations in their 
minds. They were conferring with each other 
and referring back to their governments for 
instructions and then conferring again. Com- 
mon sense and necessity were being restrained 
by political sensitiveness and inertia. In 
Hoover's mind one thing was perfectly clear. 
Time was of the essence of his contract. Every 
day of delay meant more difficulty. The East- 
ern countries, struggling to find themselves in 
the chaos of disorganization, waiting for an of- 
ficial determination of their new borders, were 
already becoming entangled in frontier brawls 
and quarreling over the control of local sources 
of food and fuel. Their people were suffering 
terribly and were clamoring for help. Hoover 
was there to help ; he wanted to begin helping. 
So he began. 

Hoover had already taken the position that 
the day of hate was passed. With the end of 
mutual slaughter and destruction came imme- 
diately the time for help. It was like that piti- 
ful period after the battle when the bloody field 
is taken over by the stretcher-bearers, the Red 

260 



AMERICAN RELIEF ADMINISTRATION 

Cross nurses, and the tireless surgeons. So 
Hoover had already clearly in mind that the 
hand of charity was going to be extended to 
the sufferers in Hungary and Austria and 
Germany as well as to the people who were 
suffering because of the ravages of the armies 
of these nations. Dr. Alonzo Taylor and I, 
whom he had sent early in December to Switz- 
erland to get into close touch with the situation 
in Eastern and Central Europe, listened, for 
him, in Berne to the pitiful pleas of the repre- 
sentatives of starving Vienna. By January 
Hoover's missions were installed and at work 
in Trieste, Belgrade, Vienna, Prague, Buda- 
pest, and Warsaw. In February Dr. Tay- 
lor and I were reporting the German situation 
from Berlin. 

The attitude of the people in these countries 
was one of pathetic dependence on American 
aid and confidence that it would be forthcom- 
ing. The name of Hoover was already known 
all over Europe because of his Belgian work, 
and the swiftly-spread news that he was in 
charge of the new relief work acted like magic 
in restoring hope to these despairing millions. 

261 



HERBERT HOOVER 

When the first food mission to Poland, mak- 
ing its way in the first week of January, 1919, 
with difficulty and discomfort because of the 
demoralized transportation conditions, had 
reached that part of its journey north of 
Vienna towards Cracow which brought it into 
Czecho- Slovakia, our train halted at a station 
gaily decorated with flags and bunting among 
which the American colors were conspicuous. 
A band was playing vigorously something that 
sounded like the Star- Spangled Banner, and 
a group of top -hatted and frock-coated gentle- 
men were the front figures in a great crowd 
that covered the station platform. I was some- 
what dismayed by these evident preparations 
for a reception, for we were not coming to try 
to help Czecho- Slovakia, but Poland, between 
which two countries sharp feeling was already 
developing in connection with the dispute over 
the Teschen coal fields. I told my interpreter, 
therefore, to hurry off the train and explain the 
situation. 

He returned with one of the gentlemen of 
high hat and long coat who said, in broken 
French: "Well, anyway, you are the food mis- 

262 



AMERICAN RELIEF ADMINISTRATION 

sion, aren't you?" I replied, "Yes, but we are 
going to Warsaw ; we are only passing through 
your country; we can't do anything for you." 

"But," he persisted, "you are the Americans, 
aren't you?" 

"Yes, we are the Americans." 

"Well, then, it's all right." And he waved 
an encouraging hand to the band, which re- 
sponded with increased endeavor, while the 
crowd cheered and waved the home-made 
American flags. And we were received and 
addressed, and given curious things to drink 
and a little food — we gave them in return some 
Red Cross prisoner packages we carried along 
for our own maintenance — and then we were 
sent on with more cheers and hearty God- 
speeds. 

Delay so plainly meant sharper suffering 
and more deaths that even before the necessary 
financial and other arrangements were com- 
pleted or even well under way, Hoover had 
made arrangements with the Secretary of War 
by which vessels carrying 135,000 tons of 
American food were diverted from French to 
Mediterranean ports, and with the Grain Cor- 

263 



HERBERT HOOVER 

poration, under authority of the Treasury, by 
which 145,000 tons were started for northern 
European ports. Thus by the time arrange- 
ments had been made for financing the ship- 
ments and for internal transportation and safe 
control and fair distribution, the food cargoes 
were already arriving at the nearest available 
ports. Within a few weeks from the time the 
first mission arrived in Warsaw and had re- 
ported back to Hoover the terrible situation of 
the Polish people, the relief food was flowing 
into Poland through Dantzig, the German port 
for the use of which for this purpose a special 
article in the terms of the armistice had pro- 
vided, but which was only most reluctantly and 
by dint of strong pressure made available to 
us. 

Similarly from Trieste the food trains began 
moving north while there still remained count- 
less details of arrangement to settle. I was in 
Vienna when the first train of American relief 
food came in from the South. The Italians 
were also attempting to send in some supplies, 
but so far all the trains which had started north 
had been blocked at some border point. The 

264 



AMERICAN RELIEF ADMINISTRATION 

American train was in charge of two snappy 
doughboys, a corporal and a private. When it 
reached the point of blockade the corporal was 
told that he could go no farther. He asked 
why, but only got for answer a curt statement 
that trains were not moving just now. "But 
this one is," he replied, and called to his private: 
"Let me have my gun." With revolver in hand 
he instructed the engineer to pull out. And the 
train went on. When I asked him in Vienna if 
he had worried any at the border about the cus- 
toms and military regulations of the govern- 
ments concerned which he was disregarding, he 
answered with a cheerful smile: "Not a worry; 
Mr. Hoover's representative at Trieste told me 
to take the train through and it was up to me to 
take her, wasn't it? These wop kings and gen- 
erals don't count with me. I'm working for 
Hoover." 

But the whole situation in these southeastern 
countries because of their utter disorganization 
and their hopeless embroilment in conflict with 
each other, was too impossible. Whatever de- 
gree of peace the capitals of these countries 
recognized as the diplomatic status of the mo- 

265 



HERBERT HOOVER 

meiit, the frontiers had no illusions. There 
were trenches out there and machine-guns and 
bayonets. Men were shooting at each other 
across the lines. Either the trains or cars of 
one country would be stopped at the border, 
or if they got across they did not get back. 
Some countries had enough cars and locomo- 
tives ; some did not. If one country had some 
coal to spare but was starving for lack of the 
wheat which could be spared by its neighbor, 
which was freezing, there was no way of mak- 
ing the needed exchange. The money of each 
country became valueless in the others — and of 
less and less value in its own land. Everything 
was going to pieces, including the relief. It 
simply could not go on this way. 

Finally, as a result of Hoover's insistence at 
Paris on the terrible danger of delay both to 
the lives of the people and the budding democ- 
racy of Europe, the Supreme Economic Coun- 
cil took the drastic measure of temporarily tak- 
ing over the control of the whole transportation 
system of Southeastern Europe which was put 
into Hoover's hands, leaving him to arrange 
by agreement, as best he could, according to 

266 



AMERICAN RELIEF ADMINISTRATION 

his own ideas and opportunities, the other mat- 
ters of finance, coal, the interchange of native 
commodities between adjacent countries and 
the distribution of imported food. 

Hoover became, in a word, general economic 
and life-saving manager for the Eastern Euro- 
pean countries. It is from my personal knowl- 
edge of his achievements in this extraordinary 
position during the first eight months after the 
Armistice that I have declared my belief earl- 
ier in this account that it was owing more to 
Hoover and his work than to any other single 
influence that utter anarchy and chaos and 
complete Bolshevik domination in Eastern Eu- 
rope (west of Russia) were averted. In other 
words, Hoover not only saved lives, but nations 
and civilizations by his superhuman efforts. 
The political results of his work were but inci- 
dental to his life-saving activities, but from an 
historical and international point of view they 
were even more important. 

Before, however, referring to them more spe- 
cifically, something of the scope and special 
character of the general European relief and 
supply work should be briefly explained. 

267 



HERBERT HOOVER 

Altogether, twenty countries received sup- 
plies of food and clothing under Hoover's con- 
trol acting as Director-General of Relief for 
the Supreme Economic Council. The total 
amount of these supplies delivered from De- 
cember 1, 1918, to June 1, 1919, was about 
three and a quarter million tons, comprising 
over six hundred shiploads, of a total approxi- 
mate value of eight hundred million dollars. 
There were, in addition, on June 1, port stocks 
of over 100,000 tons ready for internal deliv- 
ery, and other supplies came later. 
J> The twenty countries sharing in the sup- 
plies included Belgium and Northern France 
(through the C. R. B.), the Baltic states of 
Finland, Esthonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, a 
S jnall part of Russia, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, 
Germany, German Austria, Hungary, Rou- 
mania, Bulgaria, Greater Servia, Turkey, Ar- 
menia, Italy, and the neutrals, Denmark and 
Holland. By the terms of the Congressional 
Act appropriating the hundred million dol- 
lars for the relief of Eastern Europe, no part 
of the money could be used for the relief of 
Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, or 

268 



AMERICAN RELIEF ADMINISTRATION 

Turkey. But Vienna needed help more quickly 
and imperatively than any other eastern capi- 
tal. Hoover arranged that money should be 
advanced by England and France for food 
purchases in America for Austria and Hun- 
gary. This food was put into Hoover's hands, 
and to him was left the problem of get- 
ting it into the suffering countries. Ger- 
many was supplied under the approval of the 
Allies in accordance with the armistice agree- 
ment. 

The "relief" of Eastern and Central Europe 
was, of course, not all charity in the usually ac- 
cepted meaning of the term. The American 
hundred million dollars and the British sixty 
million dollars could not buy the needed 
eight hundred millions' worth of food and 
clothing. In fact, of that American hundred 
million all but about fifteen are now again in 
the U. S. Treasury in the form of promises 
to pay signed by various Eastern European 
Governments. About ten millions of it were 
given by Hoover outright, in the form of spe- 
cial food for child nutrition, to the under- 
nourished children from the Baltic to the Black 

269 



HERBERT HOOVER 

Sea. By additions made to this charity by the 
Eastern European Governments themselves 
and by the nationals of these countries resident 
in America, and from other sources, two and 
a half million weak children are today still 
being given (May, 1920) a daily supplemen- 
tary meal of special food. 

Hoover's experience in Belgium and North- 
ern France had taught him how necessary was 
the special care of the children. All the war- 
ravaged countries have lost a material part of 
their present generation. In some of them the 
drainage of human life and strength ap- 
proaches that of Germany after the Thirty 
Years War and of France after the Napoleonic 
wars. If they are not to suffer a racial deteri- 
oration the coming generation must be nursed 
to strength. The children, then, who are the 
immediately coming generation and the pro- 
ducers of the ones to follow, must be particu- 
larly cared for. That is what Hoover gave spe- 
cial attention to from the beginning of his re- 
lief work and it is what he is now still giving 
most of his time and energy to. 

For the general re-provisioning of the peo- 
270 



AMERICAN RELIEF ADMINISTRATION 

pies of Eastern and Central Europe all of the 
various countries supplied were called on to 
pay for the food at cost, plus transportation, to 
the extent of their possibilities. Gold, if they 
had it — all of Germany's supply was paid for 
in gold — paper money at current exchange, 
government promissory notes, and commodi- 
ties which could be sold to other countries, made 
up the payments. The charity was in making 
loans, providing the food, getting ships and 
barges and trains and coal for its transporta- 
tion, selling it at cost, and giving the service of 
several hundred active, intelligent, and sympa- 
thetic Americans, mostly young and khaki- 
clothed, and a lesser group of Allied officers, 
all devoted to getting the food where it 
was needed and seeing that it was fairly dis- 
tributed. 

It is impossible to depict the utter bewilder- 
ment and helplessness of the governments of 
the liberated nations of Eastern Europe at the 
beginning of the armistice period. Nor is it 
possible to explain adequately the enormous 
difficulties they faced in any attempt at organ- 
izing, controlling, and caring for their peoples. 

271 



HERBERT HOOVER 

With uncertain boundaries — for the demarca- 
tion of these they were waiting on a hardly less 
bewildered group of eminent gentlemen in 
Paris; with a financial and economic situation 
presenting such appalling features of demor- 
alization that they could only be realized one 
at a time; with their people clamoring for the 
immediately necessary food, fuel and clothing, 
and demanding a swift realization of all the 
benefits that their new freedom was to bring 
them; and with an eyer more menacing whist- 
ling wind of terror blowing over them from the 
East — with all this, how the responsible men 
of the governments which rapidly succeeded 
each other in these countries retained any per- 
sistent vestiges of sanity is beyond the compre- 
hension of those of us who viewed the scene at 
close range. 

For a single but sufficient illustration let us 
take the situation in the split apart fragments 
of the former great Austro-Hungarian Em- 
pire, which now constitute all or parts of Ger- 
man Austria, Hungary, Czecho- Slovakia, 
Jugo-Slavia and Roumania. For all these re- 
gions (except Roumania) Vienna had for years 

272 



AMERICAN RELIEF ADMINISTRATION 

been the center of political authority and chief 
economic control. In Vienna were many of 
the land-owners, most of the heads of the great 
industries, and the directors of the transporta- 
tion system. It was the financial and market 
center, the hub of a vast, intricate, and delicate 
orb-web of economic organization. But the 
people and the goods of the various separated 
regions, except German Austria, the smallest, 
weakest, and most afflicted one of them all, 
were cut off from it and all were cut off from 
each other. The final political boundaries were 
not yet fixed, to be sure, but actual military 
frontiers were already established with all their 
limitations on inter-communication and their 
disregard of personal needs. Shut up within 
their frontiers these regions found themselves 
varyingly with or without money — if the} 7 had 
any it was of ever-decreasing purchasing power 
— with or without food, fuel, and raw ma- 
terials for industry; and with lesser or larger 
numbers of locomotives and railway cars, 
mostly lesser. But of everything the distri- 
bution bore no calculated relation to the needs 
of the industry and commerce or even to the 

273 



HERBERT HOOVER 

actual necessities of the people for the preser- 
vation of health and life. 

Vienna, itself, "die lustige schone Stadt 
Wien" was, as it still is today and for long will 
be, the saddest great capital in Europe. Re- 
duced from its position of being the governing, 
spending, and singing and dancing capital of 
an empire of fifty-five million people — it never 
was a producing capital — to be the capital of 
a small, helpless nation of scant seven million 
people concentrated in a region unable to meet 
even their needs of food and coal — Vienna rep- 
resents the pathetic extreme of the cataclysmic 
results of War. 

But if the situation was most complex and 
hopeless in the south, it was far from simple or 
hopeful in the north. Poland, the smaller Bal- 
tic states and Finland were all in desperate 
plight and their new governments were all 
aghast at the magnitude of the problem before 
them. To add to the difficulties of general dis- 
organization of peoples, lack of the necessities 
of life, and helplessness of governments, there 
was ever continuing war. Armistice meant 
something real on the West and Austro-Ital- 

274 



AMERICAN RELIEF ADMINISTRATION 

ian fronts, but it meant little to Eastern Eu- 
rope. There was a score of very lively little 
wars going on at once over there: Poland alone 
was fighting with four different adversaries, 
one at each corner of her land. 

But the climax of the situation was reached 
in the realization by all immediately concerned 
that something saving had to be done at once, 
or the whole thing would become literal an- 
archy, with red and howling death rampant 
over all. Bolshevik Russia, just over the East- 
ern borders, was not only a vivid reality to these 
countries, but it was constantly threatening to 
come across the borders and engulf them. 

Its agents were working continuously among 
their peoples ; there were everywhere the sinis- 
ter signs of the possibility of a swift removal of 
the frontiers of Bolshevism from their Eastern 
to their Western borders. In Paris the emi- 
nent statesmen and famous generals of the 
Peace Conference and the Supreme Council 
sat and debated. They sent out occasional ul- 
timata ordering the cessation of fighting, the 
retirement from a far advanced frontier, and 
what not else. Inter-Allied Economic and 

275 



HERBERT HOOVER 

Military Missions came and looked on and con- 
ferred and returned. But nobody stopped 
fighting, and the conferences settled nothing. 
The Allies were not in a position — this need be 
no secret now — to send adequate forces to en- 
force their ultimata. An Inter-Allied Mili- 
tary Mission of four generals of America, 
Great Britain, France and Italy started by 
special train from Cracow to Lemberg to con- 
vey personally an ultimatum to the Ruthenians 
and Poles ordering them to stop fighting. The 
train was shelled by the Ruthenians east of 
Przemsyl, and the generals came back. East- 
ern Europe expected the great powers to do 
something about this, but nothing happened, 
and the discount on ultimata became still more 
marked. 

Somebody had to do something that counted. 
So Hoover did it. It was not only lives that 
had to be saved ; it was nations. It was not only 
starvation that had to be fought; it was ap- 
proaching anarchy, it was Bolshevism. 

As already stated, Hoover's food ships had 
left America for Southern and Northern Eu- 
ropean ports before Hoover's men had even 

276 



AMERICAN RELIEF ADMINISTRATION 

got into the countries to be fed. As a conse- 
quence, food deliveries closely followed food 
investigations. That counted with the people. 
One of Hoover's rules was that food could only 
go into regions where it could be safeguarded 
and controlled. That counted against Bolshe- 
vism. Shrewd Bela Kun was able to play a 
winning game in Hungary against the Peace 
Conference and Supreme Councils at Paris, 
but he was out-played by soft-voiced, square- 
jawed Captain "Tommy" Gregory, Hoover's 
general director for Southeast Europe, and it 
was this same California lawyer in khaki, 
turned food man, who, when the communist 
Kun had passed and the pendulum had swung 
as dangerously far in the other direction, al- 
lowing the audacious Hapsburg, Archduke Jo- 
seph, to slip into power, had done most to un- 
seat him. 

Gregory had been able to commandeer all the 
former military wires in the Austro-Hungar- 
ian countries for use in the relief work. So he 
was able to keep Hoover advised of all the 
news, not only promptly, but in good Ameri- 
canese. His laconic but fully descriptive mes- 

277 



HERBERT HOOVER 

sage to Paris announcing the Archduke's pass- 
ing read: "August 24th, Archie went through 
the hoop at 8 P. M. today." 

Relief in Eastern Europe was spelled by 
Hoover with a capital R and several additional 
letters. It really spelled Rehabilitation. It 
meant, in addition to sending in food, straight- 
ening out transportation, getting coal mines 
going, and the starting up of direct exchange 
of commodities among the unevenly supplied 
countries. There was some surplus wheat in 
the Banat, some surplus coal in Czecho- Slo- 
vakia, some extra locomotives in Vienna. So 
under the arbitrage of himself and his lieuten- 
ants there was set up a wholesale international 
bartering, a curious reversion to the primitive 
ways of early human society. 

This exchange of needed goods by barter 
solved in some degree the impossible financial 
situation, gave the people an incentive to 
work, and helped reduce political inflam- 
mation. It was practical statesmanship 
meeting things as they were and not as they 
might more desirably be, but were not. I say 
again, and many men in the governments of 

273 



AMERICAN RELIEF ADMINISTRATION 

Eastern Europe, and even in the councils in 
Paris 1 have said, that Hoover saved Eastern 
Europe from anarchy, and held active Bolshe- 
vism to its original frontiers. That meant sav- 
ing Western Europe, too. 

Then Hoover came back to America to be 
an American private citizen again. That is 
what he is today. He is still carrying on two 
great charities in Eastern Europe: the daily 
feeding of millions of under-nourished children, 
and the making possible, through his Ameri- 
can Relief Warehouses, for anyone in America 
to help any relatives or friends anywhere in 
Eastern Europe by direct food gifts. But he 
is doing it as private citizen. The story of 
Hoover — as far as I can write it today — is that 
of an American who saw a particular kind of 
service he could render his country and Eu- 

1 The official representative of the Treasury of one of 
the Allied powers, who had no reason to be too friendly to 
the American director of relief, for Hoover had often to 
oppose the policies of this power in the Paris councils, has 
recently written of him : "Mr. Hoover was the only man who 
emerged from the ordeal of Paris with an enhanced repu- 
tation. This complex personality, with his habitual air of 
weary Titan (or, as others might put it, of exhausted prize- 
fighter), his eyes steadily fixed on the true and essential 
facts of the European situation, imported into the Councils 
of Paris, when he took part in them, precisely that atmosphere 
of reality, knowledge, magnanimity, and disinterestedness, 
which, if they had been found in other quarters also, would 
have given us the Good Peace." 

279 



HERBERT HOOVER 

rope and humanity in a great crisis. He ren- 
dered it, and thus most truly helped make the 
world safe for Democracy and human ideals. 
It would only be fair to add to his Belgian ci- 
tation the larger one of American Citizen of 
the World and Friend of All the People. But 
he would only be embarrassed if anyone at- 
tempted to do it now. We can safely leave the 
matter to History. 



APPENDICES 



APPENDIX I 

STATEMENT GIVEN TO THE PRESS BY TJ. S. FOOD 

ADMINISTRATOR HOOVER ON NOVEMBER 12, 1918 

(THE DAY AFTER THE ARMISTICE began), 

CONCERNING THE RESULTS OF FIFTEEN 

MONTHS OF FOOD ADMINISTRATION 

With the war effectually over we enter a 
new economic era, and its immediate effect on 
prices is difficult to anticipate. The mainten- 
ance of the embargo will prevent depletion of 
our stocks by hungry Europe to any point be- 
low our necessities, and anyone who contem- 
plates speculation in food against the needs of 
these people can well be warned of the prompt 
action of the government. The prices of some 
food commodities may increase, but others will 
decrease, because with liberated shipping ac- 
cumulated stocks in the Southern hemisphere 
and the Far East will be available. The de- 
mands upon the United States will change in 
character but not in volume. 

283 



HERBERT HOOVER 

The course of food prices In the United 
States during the last fifteen months is of in- 
terest. In general, for the first twelve months 
of the Food Administration the prices to the 
farmer increased, but decreased to the con- 
sumer by the elimination of profiteering and 
speculation. Due to increases in wages, trans- 
portation, etc., the prices have been increasing 
during the last four months. 

The currents which affect food prices in the 
United States are much less controlled than in 
the other countries at war. The powers of the 
Food Administration in these matters extend: 

First, to the control of profits by manufac- 
turers, wholesalers and dealers, and the control 
of speculation in foodstuffs. They do not ex- 
tend to the control of the great majority of 
retailers, to public eating places, or the farmer, 
except so far as this can be accomplished on a 
voluntary basis. 

Second, the controlled buying for the Allied 
civil populations and armies, the neutrals and 
the American army and navy, dominates the 
market in certain commodities at all times, and 
in other commodities part of the time. In these 
cases it is possible to effect, in cooperation with 
producers and manufacturers, a certain amount 
of stability in price. I have never favored at- 
tempts to fix maximum prices by law; the uni- 

284 



APPENDIX I 

versal history of these devices in Europe has 
been that they worked against the true interests 
of both producer and consumer. 

The course of prices during the first year of 
the Food Administration, that is, practically 
the period ending July 1, 1918, is clearly shown 
by the price indexes of the Department of Ag- 
riculture and the Department of Labor. Tak- 
ing 1913 prices as the basis, the average prices 
of farm produce for the three months ending 
July 1, 1917, were, according to the Depart- 
ment of Agriculture's price index, 115 per cent 
more than the average of 1913 prices, and ac- 
cording to the Department of Labor index, it 
was 91 per cent over 1913 prices. The two de- 
partments use somewhat different bases of cal- 
culation. The average of farmers' prices one 
year later— that is, the three months ending 
July 1, 1918, was, according to the Department 
of Agriculture indexes, 127 per cent over the 
1913 basis and, according to the Department 
of Labor index, was 114 per cent over the 1913 
average. Thus farm prices increased 12 per 
cent on the Department of Agriculture calcu- 
lations and 23 per cent upon the Department 
of Labor basis. 

An examination of wholesale prices, that 
is, of prepared foods, shows a different story: 

The Department of Agriculture does not 
285 



HERBERT HOOVER 

maintain an index of wholesale prices, but the 
Department of Labor does, and this index 
shows a decrease in wholesale prices from 87 
per cent over 1913 basis to 79 per cent over the 
1913 basis for the three months ending July 1, 
1917, and July 1, 1918, respectively. The 
Food Administration price index of wholesale 
prices calculated upon still another basis shows 
a decrease of from 84 per cent to 80 per cent 
between these periods one year apart. 

Thus all indexes show an increase in farm- 
ers' prices and a decrease in wholesale prices 
of food during the year ending July 1, 1918. 
In other words, a great reduction took place in 
middlemen's charges, amounting to between 15 
per cent and 30 per cent depending upon the 
basis of calculation adopted. These decreases 
have come out of the elimination of speculation 
and profiteering. 

The course of retail prices corroborates these 
results also. Since October, 1917, the Food 
Administration has had the services of 2,500 
weekly, voluntary retail price reporters 
throughout the United States. These com- 
bined reports show that the combined prices 
per unit of 24 most important foodstuffs were 
$6.62 in October, 1917. The same quantities 
and commodities could be bought for $6.55 av- 
erage for the spring quarter, 1918 — that is, a 

286 



APPENDIX I 

small drop had taken place. During this same 
period of quarters ending July 1, 1917, to July 
1, 1918, the prices of clothing rose from 74 per 
cent to 136 per cent over 1913, or a rise of 
about 62 per cent, according to the Department 
of Labor indexes. 

Since the spring quarter, ending July 1, 
1918, there has been a rise in prices, the De- 
partment of Agriculture index for September 
showing that farm price averages were 138 per 
cent over the 1913 basis, and the Department 
of Labor index showing 136 per cent, or a 
rise from the average of the spring quarter this 
year of 11 per cent and 22 per cent respectively 
to the farmer. The wholesale price index of 
the Department of Labor shows a rise from 79 
per cent average of the spring quarter, 1918, 
to 99 per cent for September, or a rise of 20 
per cent. The Food Administration whole- 
sale index shows an increase from 80 per cent 
to 100 per cent, or 20 per cent for the same 
period. 

In October, 1918, the Food Administration 
retail price reports show that the retail cost of 
the same quantity of the 24 principal food- 
stuffs was $7.58 against an average of $6.55 
for the spring quarter 1918, or a rise of about 
18 per cent. 

It is obvious enough that prices have risen 
287 




HERBERT HOOVER 

during" the last three months both to the farmer 
and to the wholesaler and retailer. On the 
other hand, these rising prices have only kept 
pace with the farmers' prices. 

Since the first of July this year, many eco- 
nomic forces have caused a situation adverse 
to the consumer. There has been a steady in- 
crease in wages, a steady increase in cost of 
the materials which go into food production 
and manufacture, and in containers and sup- 
plies of all kinds. There has been an increase 
of 25 per cent in freight rates. The rents of 
the country are increasing and therefore costs 
of manufacturing, distribution and transpor- 
tation are steadily increasing and should in- 
evitably affect prices. The public should dis- 
tinguish between a rise in prices and profiteer- 
ing, for with increasing prices to the farmer — 
who is himself paying higher wages and cost — 
and with higher wages and transport, prices 
simply must rise. An example of what this 
may come to can be shown in the matter of 
flour. The increased cost of transportation 
from the wheat-producing regions to New 
York City amounts to about forty cents per 
barrel. The increased cost of cotton bags dur- 
ing the last fourteen months amounts to thirty 
cents per barrel of flour. The increase in 
wholesalers' costs of drayage, rents, etc., 

288 



APPENDIX I 

amounts to ten cents, or a total of eighty cents 
without including the increased costs of the 
miller or retailer. 

Such changes do not come under the cate- 
gory of profiteering. They are the necessary 
changes involved by the economic differences 
in the situation. We cannot "have our cake 
and eat it." In other words, we cannot raise 
wages, railway rates, expand our credits and 
currency, and hope to maintain the same level 
of prices of foods. All that the Food Adminis- 
tration can do is to see as far as is humanly 
possible that these alterations take place with- 
out speculation or profiteering, and that such 
readjustments are conducted in an orderly 
manner. Even though it were in the power 
of the Food Administration to repress prices, 
the effect of maintaining the same price level 
in the face of such increases in costs of manu- 
facture, transportation and distribution, would 
be ultimately to curtail production itself. We 
are in a period of inflation and we cannot avoid 
the results. 

We have had a large measure of voluntary 
cooperation both from producers, manufac- 
turers and wholesalers, in suppression of pro- 
fiteering and speculation. There are cases that 
have required stern measures, and some mil- 
lions of dollars have been refunded in one way 

289 



HERBERT HOOVER 

or another to the public. The number of firms 
penalized is proportionately not large to the 
total firms engaged. 

In the matter of voluntary control of retail- 
ers we have had more difficulty, but in the pub- 
lication from week to week in every town in 
the country of "fair prices" based upon whole- 
sale costs and type of service, there has been 
a considerable check made upon overcharges. 
The Food Administration continues through 
the armistice until legal peace and there will be 
no relaxation of efforts to keep down profiteer- 
ing and speculation to the last moment. 



APPENDIX II 

ADDRESS OF MR. HOOVER AT HIS INAUGURATION 

AS PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF 

MINING ENGINEERS (NEW YORK CITY, 

FEBRUARY 17, 1920) 1 

I have been greatly honored as your unani- 
mous choice for President of this Institute with 
which I have been associated during my entire 
professional life. It is customary for your new 
President, on these occasions, to make some ob- 
servation on matters of general interest from 
the engineer's standpoint. 

The profession of engineering in the United 
States comprises not alone scientific advisers 
on industry, but is in great majority composed 
of men in administrative positions. In such 
positions they stand midway between capital 
and labor. The character of your training and 
experience leads you to exact and quantitative 
thought. This basis of training in a great 
group of Americans furnished a wonderful re- 
cruiting ground for service in these last years 

291 



HERBERT HOOVER 

of tribulation. Many thousands of engineers 
were called into the army, the navy, and civilian 
service for the Government. Thousands of 
high offices were discharged by them with credit 
to the profession and the nation. 

We have in this country probably one hun- 
dred thousand professional engineers. The 
events of the past few years have greatly 
stirred their interest in national problems. 
This has taken practical form in the mainten- 
ance of joint committees for discussion of these 
problems and support to a free advisory bureau 
in Washington. The engineers want nothing 
for themselves from Congress. They want ef- 
ficiency in government, and you contribute to 
the maintenance of this bureau out of sheer 
idealism. This organization for consideration 
of national problems has had many subjects 
before it and I propose to touch on some of 
them this evening. 

Even more than ever before is there neces- 
sity for your continued interest in this vast 
complex of problems that must be met by our 
Government. We are faced with a new orien- 
tation of our country to world problems. We 
face a Europe still at war; still amid social 
revolutions; some of its peoples still slacking 
on production; millions starving; and there- 
fore the safety of its civilization is still hanging 

292 



APPENDIX II 

by a slender thread. Every wind that blows 
carries to our shores an infection of social dis- 
eases from this great ferment; every convul- 
sion there has an economic reaction upon our 
own people. If we needed further proof of 
the interdependence of the world, we have it 
today in the practical blockade of our export 
market. The world is asking us to ratify long 
delayed peace in the hope that such confidence 
will be restored as will enable her to recon- 
struct her economic life. We are today con- 
templating maintenance of an enlarged army 
and navy in preparedness for further upheav- 
als in the world, and failing to provide even 
some insurance against war by a league to pro- 
mote peace. 

Out of the strain of war, weaknesses have 
become ever more evident in our administrative 
organization, in our legislative machinery. Our 
federal government is still overcentralized, for 
we have upon the hands of our government 
enormous industrial activities which have yet 
to be demobilized. We are swamped with debt 
and burdened with taxation. Credit is woe- 
fully inflated; speculation and waste are ram- 
pant. Our own productivity is decreasing. 
Our industrial population is crying for rem- 
edies for the increasing cost of living and as- 
piring to better conditions of life and labor. 

293 



HERBERT HOOVER 

But beyond all this, great hopes and aspirations 
are abroad ; great moral and social forces have 
been stimulated by the war and will not be 
quieted by the ratification of peace. These are 
but some of the problems with which we must 
deal. I have no fear that our people will not 
find solutions. But progress is sometimes like 
the old-fashioned rail fence — some rails are per- 
haps misshapen and all look to point the wrong 
way ; but in the end, the fence progresses. 

Your committees, jointly with those of other 
engineering societies, have had before them and 
expressed their views on many matters con- 
cerning the handling of the railways, shipping, 
the reorganization of the government engineer- 
ing work, the national budget, and other prac- 
tical items. 

The war nationalization of railways and ship- 
ping are our two greatest problems in govern- 
mental control awaiting demobilization. There 
are many fundamental objections to continua- 
tion of these experiments in socialism necessi- 
tated by the war. They lie chiefly in their de- 
struction of initiative in our people and the 
dangers of political domination that can grow 
from governmental operation. Beyond this, 
the engineers will hold that the successful con- 
duct of great industries is to a transcendant de- 
gree dependent upon the personal abilities and 

294 



APPENDIX II 

character of their employees and staff. No 
scheme of political appointment has ever yet 
been devised that will replace competition in 
its selection of ability and character. Both 
shipping and railways have today the advan- 
tage of many skilled persons sifted out in 
the hard school of competition, and even then 
the government operation of these enterprises 
is not proving satisfactory. Therefore, the ul- 
timate inefficiency that would arise from the 
deadening paralysis of bureaucracy has not 
yet had full opportunity for development. Al- 
ready we can show that no government under 
pressure of ever-present political or sectional 
interests can properly conduct the risks of ex- 
tension and improvement, or can be free from 
local pressure to conduct unwarranted services 
in industrial enterprise. On the other hand, 
our people have long since recognized that we 
cannot turn monopoly over to unrestrained 
operation for profit nor that the human rights 
of employees can ever be dominated by divi- 
dends. 

Our business is handicapped on every side 
by the failure of our transportation facilities to 
grow with the country. It is useless to talk 
about increased production to meet an increased 
standard of living in an increasing population 
without a greatly increased transport equip- 

295 



HERBERT HOOVER 

ment. Moreover, there are very great social 
problems underlying our transport system ; to- 
day their contraction is forcing a congestion of 
our population around the great cities with all 
that these overswollen settlements import. 
Even such great disturbances as the coal strike 
have a minor root in our inadequate transpor- 
tation facilities and their responsibility for in- 
termittent operation of the mines. 

We are all hoping that Congress will find a 
solution to this problem that will be an ad- 
vanced step toward the combined stimulation 
of the initiative of the owners, the efficiency of 
operation, the enlistment of the good will of 
the employees, and the protection of the public. 
The problem is easy to state. Its solution is 
almost overwhelming in complexity. It must 
develop with experience, step by step, toward 
a real working partnership of its three ele- 
ments. 

The return of the railways to the owners 
places predominant private operation upon its 
final trial. If instant energy, courage and 
large vision in the owners should prove lacking 
in meeting the immediate situation we shall be 
■faced with a reaction that will drive the coun- 
try to some other form of control. Energetic 
enlargement of equipment, better service, co- 
operation with employees, and the least possible 

296 






APPENDIX II 

advance in rates, together with freedom from 
political interest, will be the scales upon which 
the public will weigh these results. 

Important phases of our shipping problem 
that have come before you should receive wider 
discussion by the country. As the result of 
war pressure, we shall spend over $2,800,- 
000,000 in the completion of a fleet of nineteen 
hundred ships of a total of 111,000,000 tons — 
nearly one quarter of the world's cargo ship- 
ping. We are proud of this great expansion 
of our marine, and we wish to retain it under 
the American flag. Our shipping problem 
has one large point of departure from the rail- 
way problem, for there is no element of nat- 
ural monopoly. Anyone with a water-tight 
vehicle can enter upon the seas today, and our 
government is now engaged upon the conduct 
of a nationalized industry in competition with 
our own people and all the world besides. 
While in the railways government inefficiency 
could be passed on to the consumer, on the 
seas we will sooner or later find it translated 
to the national Treasury. 

Until the present time, there has been a 
shortage in the world's shipping, but this is 
being rapidly overtaken and we shall soon be 
met with fierce competition of private industry. 
If the government continues in the shipping 

297 



HERBERT HOOVER 

business, we shall be disappointed from the 
point of view of profits. For we shall be faced 
with the ability of private enterprise to make 
profits from the margins of higher cost of gov- 
ernment operation alone. Aside from those 
losses inherent in bureaucracy and political 
pressure, there are others special to this case. 
The largest successfully managed cargo fleet 
in the world comprises about one hundred and 
twenty ships and yet we are attempting to 
manage nineteen hundred ships at the hands 
of a government bureau. In normal times the 
question of profit or loss in a ship is measured 
by a few hundred tons of coal wasted, by a lit- 
tle extravagance in repairs, or by four or five 
days on a round trip. Beyond this, private 
shipping has a free hand to set up such give- 
and-take relationships with merchants all over 
the world as will provide sufficient cargo for 
all legs of a voyage, and these arrangements of 
cooperation cannot be created by government 
employees without charge or danger of favorit- 
ism. Lest fault be found, our government of- 
ficials are unable to enter upon the detailed 
higgling in fixing rates required by every cargo 
and charter. Therefore they must take refuge 
in rigid regulations and in fixed rates. In 
result, their competitors underbid by the small- 
est margins necessary to get the cargoes. The 

298 



APPENDIX II 

effect of our large fleet in the world's markets 
is thus to hold up rates, for so long as this great 
fleet in one hand holds a fixed rate others will 
only barely underbid. If we hold up rates an 
increasing number of our ships will be idle as 
the private fleet grows. On the other hand, if 
we reduce rates we shall be underbid until the 
government margin of larger operation cost 
causes us to lose money. 

We shall yet be faced with the question of 
demobilizing a considerable part of this fleet 
into private hands, or frankly acknowledging 
that we operate it for other reasons than inter- 
est on our investment. In this whole problem 
there are the most difficult considerations re- 
quiring the best business thought in the coun- 
try. In the first instance, our national prog- 
ress requires that we retain a large fleet under 
our flag to protect our national commercial ex- 
pansion overseas. Secondly, we may find it 
desirable to hold a considerable government 
fleet to build up trade routes in expansion of 
our trade, even at some loss in operation. 
Thirdly, in order to create this fleet, we have 
built up an enormous ship-building industry. 
Fifty per cent of the capacity of our ship yards 
will more than provide any necessary construc- 
tion for American account. Therefore there is 
a need of obtaining foreign orders, or the re- 

299 



HERBERT HOOVER 

duction of capacity, or both. I believe, with 
most engineers, that, with our skill in repetition 
manufacture, we can compete with any ship 
builders in the world and maintain our Ameri- 
can wage standards ; but this repetition manu- 
facture implies a constant flow of orders. It 
would seem highly desirable, in order to main- 
tain the most efficient yards until they can es- 
tablish themselves firmly in the world's indus- 
trial fabric, that the Government should con- 
tinue to let some ship construction contracts 
to the lowest bidders, these contracts to sup- 
plement private building in such a way as to 
maintain the continuous operation of the most 
economical yards and the steady employment 
of our large number of skilled workers en- 
gaged therein. 

When we consider giving orders for new 
ships, we must at the same time consider the 
sale of ships, as we cannot go on increasing this 
fleet. When we consider sale, we are con- 
fronted with the fact that our present ships 
were built under expensive conditions of war, 
costing from three to four times per ton the 
pre-war amount, and that already any mer- 
chant, subject to the long time of delivery, can 
build a ship for seventy-five per cent of their 
cost. It would at least seem good national 
policy to sell ships today for the price we can 

300 



APPENDIX II 

contract for delivery a year or two hence, thus 
making the government a reservoir for con- 
tinuous construction. 

We could thus stabilize building industry to 
some degree and also bring the American- 
owned fleet into better balance, if each time 
that the government sold three or four emerg- 
ency constructed cargo vessels it gave an order 
for one ship of a better and faster type. This 
would make reduction in our ship-building 
steadier and would give the country the type 
of ships we need. 

Our j oint engineering committees have exam- 
ined with a great deal of care into the organi- 
zation of and our expenditure on public works 
and technical services. These committees have 
consistently and strongly urged the appalling 
inefficiency in the government organization of 
these matters. They report to you that the 
annual expenditure on such works and services 
now amounts to over $250,000,000 per annum, 
and that they are carried out today in nine dif- 
ferent governmental departments. They re- 
port that there is a great waste by lack of na- 
tional policy of coordination, in overlapping 
with different departments, in competition with 
each other in the purchase of supplies and ma- 
terials, and in the support of many engineering 
staffs. 

301 



HERBERT HOOVER 

They recommend the solution that almost 
every civilized government has long since 
adopted, that is, the coordination of these 
measures into one department under which all 
such undertakings should be conducted and 
controlled. As a measure practical to our gov- 
ernment, they have advocated that all such 
bureaus should be transferred to the Interior 
Department, and all the bureaus not relating 
to those matters should be transferred from the 
Interior to other departments. The Commit- 
tee concludes that no properly organized and 
directed saving in public works can be made 
until such a re-grouping and consolidation is 
carried out, and that all of the cheeseparing 
that normally goes on in the honest effort of 
Congressional committees to control depart- 
mental expenditure is but a tithe of that which 
could be effected if there were some concentra- 
tion of administration along the lines long since 
demonstrated as necessary to the success of 
private business. 

Another matter of government organization 
to which our engineers have given adhesion is 
in the matter of the national budget. To minds 
charged with the primary necessity of advance 
planning, coordination, provision of synchron- 
izing parts in organization, the whole notion of 
our hit-or-miss system is repugnant. A bud- 

302 



APPENDIX II 

get system is not the remedy for all administra- 
tive ills, but it provides a basis of organization 
that at least does not paralyze administrative 
efficiency as our system does today. Through 
it, the coordination of expenditure in govern- 
ment department, the prevention of waste and 
overlapping in government bureaus, the ex- 
posure of the "pork barrel," and the balancing 
of the relative importance of different national 
activities in the allocation of our national in- 
come can all be greatly promoted. Legislation 
would also be expedited. No budget that does 
not cover all government expenditure is worth 
enactment. Furthermore, without such reor- 
ganization as the grouping of construction 
departments, the proper formulation of a bud- 
get would be hopeless. The budget system in 
some form is so nearly universal in civilized gov- 
ernments and in completely conducted business 
enterprise, and has been adopted in thirty of 
our States, that its absence in our federal gov- 
ernment is most extraordinary. It is, how- 
ever, but a further testimony that it is always 
a far cry of our citizens from the efficiency in 
their business to interest in the efficiency of 
their government. 

Another great national problem to which 
every engineer in the United States is giving 
earnest thought, and with which he comes in 

303 



HERBERT HOOVER 

daily contact, is that of the relationship of em- 
ployer and employee in industry. In this, as 
in many other national problems today, we are 
faced with a realization that the science of eco- 
nomics has altered from a science of wealth to 
a science of human relationships to wealth. We 
have gone on for many years throwing the 
greatest of our ingenuity and ability into the 
improvement of processes and tools of produc- 
tion. We have until recently greatly neglected 
the human factor that is so large an element 
in our very productivity. The development of 
vast repetition in the process of industry has 
deadened the sense of craftsmanship, and the 
great extension of industry has divorced the 
employer and his employee from that contact 
that carried responsibility for the human prob- 
lem. This neglect of the human factor has ac- 
cumulated much of the discontent and unrest 
throughout our great industrial population 
and has reacted in a decrease of production. 
Yet our very standards of living are dependent 
on a maximum productivity up to the total ne- 
cessities of our population. 

Another economic result is, or will be yet, a 
repercussion upon the fundamental industry 
of the United States, that is, agriculture. For 
the farmer will be unable to maintain his pro- 
duction in the face of a constant increase in 

304 



APPENDIX II 

the cost of his supplies and labor through 
shrinkage in production in other industries. 
The penalty of this disparity of effort comes 
mainly out of the farmer's own earnings. 

I am daily impressed with the fact that there 
is but one way out, and that is again to re- 
establish through organized representation that 
personal cooperation between employer and 
employee in production that was a binding 
force when our industries were smaller of unit 
and of less specialization. Through this, the 
sense of craftsmanship and the interest in pro- 
duction can be re-created and the proper estab- 
lishment of conditions of labor and its partici- 
pation in a more skilled administration can be 
worked out. The attitude of refusal to partici- 
pate in collective bargaining with representa- 
tives of the employees' own choosing is the ne- 
gation of this bridge to better relationship. 
On the other hand, a complete sense of obli- 
gation to bargains entered upon is fundamen- 
tal to the process itself. The interests of 
employee and employer are not necessarily an- 
tagonistic; they have a great common ground 
of mutuality and if we could secure emphasis 
upon these common interests we would greatly 
mitigate conflict. Our government can stimu- 
late these forces, but the new relationship of 
employer and employee must be a matter of 

305 



HERBERT HOOVER 

deliberate organization within industry itself. 
I am convinced that the vast majority of 
American labor fundamentally wishes to co- 
operate in production, and that this basis of 
goodwill can be organized and the vitality of 
production re-created. 

Many of the questions of this industrial re- 
lationship involve large engineering problems, 
as an instance of which I know of no better ex- 
ample than the issue you plan for discussion 
tomorrow in connection with the soft coal 
industry. Broadly, here is an industry func- 
tioning badly from an engineering and conse- 
quently from an economic and human stand- 
point. Owing to the intermittency of produc- 
tion, seasonal and local, this industry has been 
equipped to a peak load of twenty-five or 
thirty per cent over the average load. It has 
been provided with a twenty-five or thirty per 
cent larger labor complement than it would re- 
quire if continuous operation could be brought 
about. I hope your discussion will throw some 
light on the possibilities of remedy. There lies 
in this intermittency not only a long train of 
human misery through intermittent employ- 
ment, but the economic loss to the community 
of over a hundred thousand workers who could 
be applied to other production, and the cost of 
coal could be decreased to the consumer. This 

306 



APPENDIX II 

intermittency lies at the root of the last strike 
in the attempt of the employees to secure an 
equal division among themselves of this partial 
employment at a wage that could meet their 
view of a living return on full employment. 

These are but a few of the problems that con- 
front us. But in the formulating of measures 
of solution, we need a constant adherence to 
national ideal and our own social philosophy. 

In the discussion of these ideals and this so- 
cial philosophy, we hear much of radicalism and 
of reaction. They are, in fact, not an academic 
state of mind but realize into real groups and 
real forces influencing the solution of economic 
problems in this community. In their present- 
day practical aspects, they represent, on one 
hand, roughly, various degrees of exponents of 
socialism, who would directly or indirectly 
undermine the principle of private property 
and personal initiative, and, on the other hand, 
those exponents who in varying degrees desire 
to dominate the communitjr for profit and 
privilege. They both represent attempts to 
introduce or preserve class privilege, either a 
moneyed or a bureaucratic aristocracy. We 
have, however, in American democracy an ideal 
and a social philosophy that sympathizes 
neither with radicalism nor reaction as they are 
manifested today. 

307 



HERBERT HOOVER 

For generations the American people have 
been steadily developing a social philosophy 
as part of their own democracy, and in these 
ideals, it differs from all other democracies. 
This philosophy has stood this period of test in 
the fire of common sense; it is, in substance, 
that there should be an equality of opportunity, 
an equal chance, to every citizen. This view 
that every individual should, within his life- 
time, not be handicapped in securing that par- 
ticular niche in the community to which his 
abilities and character entitle him, is itself the 
negation of class. Human beings are not equal 
in these qualities. But a society that is based 
upon a constant flux of individuals in the com- 
munity, upon the basis of ability and character, 
is a moving virile mass ; it is not a stratification 
of classes. Its inspiration is individual initia- 
tive. Its stimulus is competition. Its safe- 
guard is education. Its greatest mentor is free 
speech and voluntary organization for public 
good. Its expression in legislation is the com- 
mon sense and common will of the majority. 
It is the essence of this democracy that progress 
of the mass must arise from progress of the in- 
dividual. It does not permit the presence in 
the community of those who would not give full 
meed of their service. 

Its conception of the State is one that, rep- 
308 



APPENDIX II 

resentative of all the citizens, will in the region 
of economic activities apply itself mainly to the 
stimulation of knowledge, the undertaking only 
of works beyond the initiative of the individual 
or group, the prevention of economic domina- 
tion of the few over the many, and the least en- 
trance into commerce that government func- 
tions necessitate. 

The method and measures by which we solve 
this accumulation of great problems will de- 
pend upon which of these three conceptions 
will reach the ascendancy amongst our 
people. 

If we cling to our national ideals it will mean 
the final isolation and the political abandon- 
ment of the minor groups who hope for domina~ 
tion of the government, either by "interests" or 
by radical social theories through the control 
of our political machinery. I sometimes feel 
that lawful radicalism in politics is less danger- 
ous than reaction, for radicalism is blatant and 
displays itself in the open. Unlawful radical- 
ism can be handled by the police. Reaction too 
often fools the people through subtle channels 
of obstruction and progressive platitudes. There 
is little danger of radicalism's ever controlling a 
country with so large a farmer population, ex- 
cept in one contingency. That contingency is 
from a reflex of continued attempt to control 

309 



HERBERT HOOVER 

this country by the "interests" and other forms 
of our domestic reactionaries. 

The mighty upheaval following the world 
war has created turmoil and confusion in our 
own country no less than in all other lands. If 
America is to contribute to the advance of civi- 
lization, it must first solve its own problems, 
must first secure and maintain its own strength. 
The kind of problems that present themselves 
are more predominantly economic — national as 
well as international — than at any period in 
our history. They require quantitative and 
prospective thinking and a sense of organiza- 
tion. This is the sort of problems that your 
profession deals with as its daily toil. You 
have an obligation to continue the fine service 
you have initiated and to give it your united 
skill. 



APPENDIX III 

ADDRESS OF MR. HOOVER BEFORE THE BOSTON 
CHAMBER OF COMMERCE ( MARCH 24, 1920) 

As you are aware, a report has recently been 
issued by the Industrial Conference, of which I 
have been a member together with Governor 
McCall and Mr. Hooker of your State. The 
conference embraced among its members repre- 
sentatives from all shades of life including as 
great a trade unionist as Secretary Wilson. I 
propose to discuss a part of the problem consid- 
ered by that commission. There is no more dif- 
ficult or more urgent question confronting us 
than constructive solution of the employment 
relationship. It is not sufficient to dismiss the 
subject with generous and theoretic phrases, 
"justice to capital and labor," "the golden 
rule," "the paramount interest of the people," 
or a score of others, for there underlies this 
question the whole problem of the successful 
development of our democracy. 

311 



HERBERT HOOVER 

During last year there was a great deal of 
industrial unrest throughout the entire world. 
This has somewhat moderated during the last 
few months, but the underlying causes are only 
slumbering. Because the country is not today 
involved in any great industrial conflicts, we 
should not congratulate ourselves that the 
problem of industrial relations has been solved. 
Furthermore, the time for proper consideration 
of great problems does not lie in the midst of 
great public conflict but in sober consideration 
during times of tranquillity. There is little to 
be gained by discussion of the causes of indus- 
trial unrest. Every observer is aware of the 
category of disturbing factors and every one 
will place a different emphasis on the different 
factors involved. 

There is, however, one outsFanding matter 
that differentiates our present occasion from 
those that have gone before. It cannot be de- 
nied that unrest in our industrial community 
is characterized more than ever before by the 
purposes and desires that go beyond the de- 
mand for higher wages and shorter hours. The 
aspirations inherent in this form of restless- 
ness are to a great extent psychological and in- 
tangible. They are not, for this reason, any less 
significant. There is perhaps in some local 
cases an infection of European patent medi- 

312 



APPENDIX III 

cines, and the desire to use labor for political 
purposes. Aside from this, however, they do 
reveal a desire on the part of the workers to 
exert a larger and more organic influence in 
the processes of industrial life. They want bet- 
ter assurance that they will receive a just pro- 
portion of their share of production. I do not 
believe those desires are to be discouraged. 
They should be turned into helpful and coop- 
erative channels. There is no surer road to 
radicalism than repression. 

One can only lead up to consideration of 
these problems by tracing some features of our 
industrial development even though they may 
be trite to most of you. One underlying cause 
of these discontents is that with the growth of 
large plants there has been a loss of personal 
contact between employers and employees. 
With the high specialization and intense repe- 
tition in labor in industrial processes, there has 
been a loss of creative interest. It is, however, 
the increased production that we have gained 
by this enlargement of industry that has en- 
abled the standard of living to be steadily ad- 
vanced. The old daily personal contact of em- 
ployer and employee working together in small 
units carried with it a great mutuality of re- 
sponsibility. There was a far greater under- 
standing of the responsibilities toward em- 

313 



HERBERT HOOVER 

ployees and there was a better understanding 
by employees of the economic limitations im- 
posed upon the employer. Nor can the direct 
personal contact in the old manner be restored. 

With the growth of capital into larger units, 
there was an inequality of the bargaining 
power of the individual. Labor has therefore 
gradually developed its defense against the 
aggregation of capital by counter-organization. 
The organized uses of strike and lockout on 
either side and the entrance of their organiza- 
tion into the political arena have become the 
weapons for enforcement of demands. The 
large development of industrial units with pos- 
sible cessation of production and service, 
through strikes and lockouts, penalizes the pub- 
lic. The public is not content to see these con- 
flicts go on, for they do not alone represent loss 
in production, and thus lowering of the stan- 
dard of living, but also they may, by suspension 
of public service, jeopardize the life of the com- 
munity. 

But the solution of the industrial problem 
is not solely the prevention of conflict and its 
losses by finding methods of just determination 
of wages and hours. Not only must solution 
of those things be found out but, if we are to 
secure increased production and increased stan- 
dard of living, we must reawaken interest in 

314 



APPENDIX III 

creation, in craftsmanship and contribution of 
his intelligence to management. We must sur- 
round employment with assurance of just di- 
vision of production. We must enlist the in- 
terest and confidence of the employees in the 
business and in business processes. 

We have devoted ourselves for many years 
to the intense improvement of the machinery 
and processes of production. We have ne- 
glected the broader human development and 
satisfactions of life of the employee that leads 
to greater ability, creative interest, and co- 
operation in production. It is in stimulation 
of these values that we can lift our industry to 
its highest state of productivity, that we can 
place the human factor upon the plane of per- 
fection reached by our mechanical processes. 
To do these things requires the cooperation of 
labor itself and to obtain cooperation we must 
have an intimate organized relationship be- 
tween employer and the employee and that 
cannot be obtained by benevolence; that can 
only be obtained by calling the employee to a 
reciprocal service. 

Therefore it has been the guiding thought of 
the conference that if these objects are to be 
obtained a definite and continuous organized 
relationship must be created between the em- 
ployer and the employee and that by the or- 

315 



HERBERT HOOVER 

ganization of this relationship conflict in indus- 
try can be greatly mitigated, misunderstanding 
can be eliminated, and that spirit of cooperation 
can be established that will advance the con- 
ditions of labor and secure increased produc- 
tivity. 

It is idle to argue that there are at times no 
conflict of interest between the employee and 
the employer. But there are wide areas of ac- 
tivity in which their interests should coincide, 
and it is the part of statesmanship on both sides 
to organize this identity of interest in order to 
limit the area of conflict. If we are to go on 
with the present disintegrating forces, these 
conflicts become year by year more critical to 
the existence of the State. If we cannot se- 
cure a reduction in their destructive results by 
organization of mutual action in industry, then 
I fear that public resentment will generate a 
steadily larger intervention of the Government 
into these questions. 

In consideration of a broad, comprehensive, 
national policy, the Conference had before it 
four possible alternative lines of action. First, 
the attempt to hew out a national policjr in the 
development of the progressive forces at work 
for better understanding in industry under 
such conditions as would maintain self-govern- 
ment in industry itself; or, secondly, to adopt 

316 



APPENDIX III 

some of the current plans of industrial courts, 
involving summary decision with jail for re- 
fusal to accept, such as that initiated in the 
State of Kansas; or, thirdly, the nationaliza- 
tion at least of the services upon which the very 
life of the community depends ; fourthly, to do 
nothing. 

In a survey of the forces making for self- 
government in industry, the Conference con- 
sidered that definite encouragement must be 
given to the principles of collective bargaining, 
of conciliation, of arbitration, but that such 
forces could not develop in an atmosphere of 
legal repression. There is but little conflict of 
view as to the principle of collective bargaining 
and its vital corollary, fidelity to the bargain 
made. There has been conflict over the meth- 
ods of representation on both sides. The Con- 
ference, therefore, has proposed that the 
Government should intervene to assist in deter- 
mination of the credentials of the representa- 
tives of both sides in case of disagreement, and 
that such pressure should be brought to bear as 
would induce voluntary entry into collective 
bargain. Furthermore, it was considered that 
the large development of conciliation and arbi- 
tration already current in connection with such 
bargaining should be encouraged and organ- 
ized under a broad national plan that would 

317 



HERBERT HOOVER 

give full liberty of action to all existing ar- 
rangements of this character and stimulate 
their further development. 

The Conference has therefore proposed to set 
up a small amount of governmental machinery 
comprising Chairmen covering various reg- 
ions in the United States, with a Central Board 
in Washington, as a definite organization for 
the promotion of these agencies. It has be- 
lieved that this is a step consonant with the nor- 
mal development of our institutions and the 
progressive forces already in motion, and that 
in such steps lie the greatest hope of success. 
No one is compelled to submit to the machinery 
established but where the employer and em- 
ployee refuse to enter into, or fail in, bargain- 
ing, then through the use of this machinery the 
public stimulates them to come together under 
conditions of just determination of the creden- 
tials of their representatives. The plan is, 
therefore, a development of the principle of 
collective bargaining. It is not founded on the 
principle of arbitration or compulsion. It is de- 
signed to prevent the losses through cessation 
of production due to conflict but, beyond this, 
to build up such relationship between employer 
and employees as will not only mitigate such 
disaster but will ultimately extend further into 
the development of the great mutual ground 

318 



APPENDIX III 

of interest of increased production and under 
conditions of satisfaction to both sides. It is 
a part of the conception of the Conference that 
only in bargaining and mutual agreement can 
there be given that free play of economic forces 
necessary to adjust the complex conditions 
under which our industries must function. 

Reduction of conflict in industry is the phase 
that not only looms large in the public mind, 
but conflict is the public exhibit of the greatest 
mark of failure in industrial relations. The im- 
minence of conflict is evidence of failure to have 
discussion or to arrival at mutual agreement. 
Therefore, under the plan of the Conference 
that mutual agreement is the best basis for pre- 
vention of conflict, the second step in the Con- 
ference proposals is that there should be a pen- 
alty for failure to submit to such processes. 
That penalty is a public inquiry into the causes 
of the dispute and the proper ventilation to 
public opinion as to its rights and wrongs. The 
strength of the penalty is based upon the con- 
viction that neither side can afford to lose pub- 
lic good will. Pressure to rectitude by gov- 
ernment investigation is distinctly an Ameri- 
can institution. It is not an intervention of 
public interest that is usually welcomed. In 
the plan of this Conference, this general re- 
pugnance to investigation is depended upon as 

319 



HERBERT HOOVER 

a persuasive influence to the parties of the con- 
flict to get together and settle their own quar- 
rels. They are given the alternative of investi- 
gation or collective bargain under persuasive 
circumstances. In order to increase the moral 
pressures surrounding the investigation, either 
one of the parties to the conflict may become a 
member of the board of investigation, provided 
he will have entered on an a priori undertaking 
that he is prepared to submit his case to orderly 
and simple processes of adjustment. Thus his 
opponent will be put at more than usual dis- 
advantage in the investigation. If both sides 
should agree to submit to normal processes of 
settlement, the board of investigation becomes 
at once the stage of a collective bargain and the 
investigation ceases. 

I will not trouble you with the elaborate de- 
tails of the plan, for they involved a great deal 
of consideration as to many difficult questions 
of selection of representatives, provision for 
action by umpires, for appeal to a board in 
certain contingencies, the character of ques- 
tions to be considered, methods of enforcement, 
standards of labor, and so on. The point that 
I wish to make clear is that the Conference 
plan is fundamentally the promotion of collec- 
tive bargaining under fair conditions of repre- 
sentation by both sides and the definite organi- 

320 



APPENDIX III 

zation of public opinion only as a pressure on 
the parties at conflict to secure it. It is there- 
fore basically not a plan of arbitration, nor is it 
an industrial court. It is stimulation to self- 
government in industry. The plan contains 
no essence of opposition to organized labor or 
organized employers. It involves no dispute of 
the right to strike or lock out, nor of the closed 
or open shop. It simply proposes a sequence of 
steps that should lead to collective bargain 
without imposing compulsions, courts, injunc- 
tions, fines, or jail. It is at least a new step 
and worth careful consideration before em- 
ployees and employers subject themselves to 
the growth of public demands for the other al- 
ternatives of wider governmental interference. 
The Conference has set out the critical ne- 
cessity of the development within industry it- 
self of a better basis of understanding as hav- 
ing the great values that all prevention has over 
cures. There have been hopeful developments 
in American industry during the past two or 
three years in this direction. The first unit of 
employment relationship is each industrial es- 
tablishment, and if we would battle with mis- 
understanding and secure mutual action it 
must be at this stage. It takes its visible form 
in the organization in many establishments 
under various plans of shop councils, shop 

321 



HERBERT HOOVER 

committees, shop conference, all of which are 
based on the democratic selection of represen- 
tatives of employees who shall remain in con- 
tinuous open and frank relation and confer- 
ence with the employer in the interests of both. 
Where this development has had success it 
has had one essential foundation; that is, that 
it must be conceived in a spirit of cooperation 
for mutual benefit and it has invariably lost 
out where it has been conceived solely to bar- 
gain for wages and conditions of labor. It does 
not necessarily involve profit-sharing, but it 
does involve a human approach to the problems 
on both sides and a mutual effort at better- 
ment. 

It is the organization of such contact be- 
tween employer and employees which distin- 
guishes this advance from the previous drift 
in large industry. This type of organization 
has met with success not only in non-union 
shops but in unionized shops, and in the latter 
case it has imported the spirit of mutuality in 
addition to sheer negotiation of grievance as 
to conditions of labor. It cannot, in our view, 
succeed if it is to be conceived in a spirit of an- 
tagonism either to employer or to union or- 
ganization. 

The trade unions of the United States have 
conferred such essential services upon their 

322 



APPENDIX III 

membership and upon the community that their 
real values are not to be overlooked or de- 
stroyed. They can fairly claim great credit 
for the abolition of sweat shops, for recogni- 
tion of fairer hours in industry, reduction of 
overstrain, employment under more healthful 
conditions, and many other reforms. These 
gains have been made through hard-fought 
collective bargains and part of the difficulties 
of the labor situation today is the bitterness 
with which these gains were accomplished. In V 
my own experience in industry I have always 
found that a frank and friendly acceptance of 
the unions' agreements, while still maintaining 
the open shop, has led to constructive relation- 
ship and mutual interest. 

In the early daj^s trade unionism was domi- 
nated mainly by the economic theories of Adam 
Smith, and union labor at that time adopted as 
one of its tenets that a decrease of productive 
effort by workers below their physical necessi- 
ties would result in more employment and bet- 
ter wage. During the past twenty-five or 
thirty years, this economic error has been stead- 
ily diminishing in American trade unions and 
while it may be adhered to by some isolated 
cases today it is not the economic conception 
of large parts of <that body. The great major- 
ity have long since realized that an increased 

323 



HERBERT HOOVER 

standard of living of the whole nation must de- 
pend upon a maximum production within the 
limits of proper conservation of the human ma- 
chine. We find, during the past few years, 
many of the unions embracing the further prin- 
ciple of actual cooperation with the employer 
to increase production. I believe the develop- 
ment of this latter theme opens avenues for 
the usefulness and growth of trade unionism of 
greater promise than any hitherto tried. I am 
aware of the current criticism in some union 
quarters of the development of the shop 
council idea for this purpose, and there are per- 
haps isolated cases that give merit to this op- 
position. The strongest argument of union 
labor against the shop council system should lie 
in the fact that nation-wide organization of 
labor is essential in order to cope with the un- 
fair employers, but I believe that if they em- 
brace encouragement to shop council organi- 
zation they open for themselves not only this 
prevention of unfairness but the whole new 
field of constructive cooperation and the fur- 
ther reduction of industrial conflict. 

Attempts by governments to stop industrial 
war are not new. The public interest in con- 
tinuous production and operation is so great 
that practically every civilized government 
has time and again ventured upon an attempt 

324 



APPENDIX III 

at its reduction. There is a great background 
of experience in this matter, for the world is 
strewn with failure of labor conferences, con- 
ciliation boards, arbitration boards, and indus- 
trial courts. This Conference, of course, had 
in front of it and in the experience of its mem- 
bers this background of the past score of years. 
I understand that recently you have had ably 
presented to you the industrial solution that 
has been enacted into legislation by the State 
of Kansas. I think some short discussion of 
this legislation may be of interest in illuminat- 
ing the difference in point of view between the 
industrial conference and that legislation. The 
Kansas plan is, I believe, the first large attempt 
at judicial settlement of labor disputes in the 
United States. With the exception of one par- 
ticular, it is practically identical with the in- 
dustrial acts of Australasia of fifteen to twenty 
years ago. It comprises the erection of an in- 
dustrial court, the legal repression of the right 
to strike and lockout under drastic penalties, 
the determination of minimum wage, and in- 
volves a consideration of a fair profit to the 
employer. The Kansas machinery goes one 
step further than any hitherto provided in this 
particular of placing more emphasis on fair 
profits and it also provides for the right of the 
State to take over and conduct the industry in 

325 



HERBERT HOOVER 

last resort. Under the enumerated industries 
in the Kansas law, probably two thirds of 
Massachusetts industry would be involved. 
No man can say that this legislation may not 
succeed in Kansas or under American condi- 
tions. The experiment is valuable, and if it 
should prove a success to both employees and 
employers Kansas will have again taken the 
initiative in service to her sister states. 

I will not be taken as a carping critic if I 
point out the difficulties in its progress on the 
basis of Australasian experience. It may, as 
did the Australasian acts, have a period of ap- 
parent success, and the workers benefit by an 
initial service in planing out the worst injus- 
tices. So far as I can see today, there is no 
reason why it will not run the same course as 
in Australia, where the amount of strikes and 
dislocation was ultimately as great under these 
laws as in countries without them. In periods 
of industrial prosperity, the advancing wage 
usually adjudicated by the industrial courts 
prevents strikes, but in times of industrial de- 
pression decisions against the work people give 
rise to the old form of resistance. 

No one denies the right of the individual 
to cease work. The question involved in this 
form of legislation is the right to combination 
in common action by strike. Whatever the 

326 



APPENDIX III 

right may be, it is a certainty that the working 
community of the civilized world adheres to 
this right as an absolute fundamental to their 
protection. They believe that the aggregation 
of capital into large units under single control 
places them at an entire disadvantage if they 
cannot threaten to use their ultimate wea- 
pon of combined cessation of labor. While 
it may be argued that the State may intervene 
in such a manner as to substitute the protection 
of justice for the right of strike and lockout, 
the belief in the right to strike has become im- 
bedded in the minds of the laboring community 
of the world to an extent that it will not receive 
with confidence any alternative in driving its 
own bargains. 

There are other difficulties in compulsory 
adjudication of disputes. The workings of 
such law necessarily result in ultimate deter- 
mination of minimum wage for all crafts and 
industries. Every different industrial unit will 
claim a different minimum based upon its local 
economic surroundings. Otherwise the com- 
petitive basis upon which industry is established 
will be undermined. No court has ever yet ade- 
quately solved these differentials and some dis- 
location of industry results. I would expect 
to see develop out of this type of minimum 
wage the same phenomenon that existed in 

327 



HERBERT HOOVER 

some parts of Australia, where certificates of 
inability to earn the minimum, and therefore 
permission to undertake employment at less 
than this wage had to be issued in order that 
employment might be found for the aged and 
disabled. The employers will naturally in face 
of a minimum wage retain in employment that 
quality of worker that can give the maximum 
effort. Another difficulty is the tendency for 
wages of all workers, regardless of their abil- 
ity, to fall to the minimum, for the employer 
naturally reduces the good to average with the 
poor worker. I would not want to be under- 
stood to necessarily oppose the possibilities of a 
minimum wage for women over large areas, as 
distinguished from craft minimums for men, 
because certain social questions enter that prob- 
lem to an important degree. 

There is another feature of the Kansas Act 
that should be given a great deal of considera- 
tion, and that is its essential provision that in 
the determination of wage disputes it shall be 
based on a fair profit to the employer. This 
must ultimately lead to a determination as to 
what a fair profit consists of, just as minimum 
wage will need be found for every craft and 
every establishment. I do not assume that any 
employer will contend for an unfair profit, but 
the termination of what may be a fair or unfair 

328 



APPENDIX III 

profit in respect to the hazards involved in the 
institution of a business, in its conduct over a 
long term of years, its necessary provisions for 
its replacement and future disasters, is a mat- 
ter that has not yet been satisfactorily deter- 
mined by either theoretic economics, legisla- 
tion, or courts. In competitive industry the 
processes of business determine this matter 
every day, and owners will only claim such 
determination by the State when the competi- 
tive tide is against them. We have long since 
recognized the rights of the State to determine 
maximum profits in case of a monopoly, but 
the determination of minimum profits ( for fair 
profit is a minimum as well as maximum) may 
deliver large burdens to the people. Moreover, 
I doubt whether labor will ultimately welcome 
such determination, for an unsuccessful plant, 
instead of abandoning its production to its 
competitors, will claim wage reductions from 
the courts, and the general level of wages can 
thus be driven down and the State, at least 
morally, becomes a guarantor of profits in over- 
developed industry. This plan in the long run 
substitutes government control of industry for 
competition. 

As to whether such acts will not tend to crush 
out initiative, credit, and curtail the proper de- 
velopment of industry, can only be determined 

329 



HERBERT HOOVER 

with time. Generally, it should be clearly- 
understood that compulsory settlement of em- 
ployment at best only assures continuity of 
production through just wages, hours and pro- 
fits. It does not approach the problem from 
the point of view of upbuilding a relation in 
industry that will, if successful, not only elimi- 
nate strikes and lockouts, but make construc- 
tively for greater production and cheaper costs. 

The economic repercussions from such regu- 
lation do not all lie in favor of either capital 
or labor. To curtail the activities in one is not 
necessarily a favor to the other. 

I am sure you would, upon consideration, 
view the entry of the Government on a nation- 
wide scale into the determination of fair wage 
and fair profit in industry, even if it could be 
accomplished without force, with great appre- 
hension. There are some things worse in the 
development of democracy than strikes and 
lockouts, and whether by legislative repression 
we do not set up economic and social repercus- 
sions of worse character is by no means deter- 
mined. They have also the deficiency in that 
they undermine the real development of self- 
government in industry and that, to me, is part 
of the growth of democracy itself. Courts and 
litigation are necessary to the preservation of 
life and property, but they are less stimulus 

330 



APPENDIX III 

to improved relations among men than are dis- 
cussion and disposal of their own differences. 

The whole world is groping for solution to 
this problem. If we cannot solve it progres- 
ively, our civilization will go back to chaos. 
We cannot stand still with the economic and 
social forces that surround us. There has 
never been a complete panacea to all human re- 
lationships so far in this world. The best we 
can do is to take short steps forward, to align 
each step to the tried ideals that have carried us 
thus far. The Conference has endeavored to 
find a plan for systematic organization of the 
forces that are making for better relationships, 
to encourage the growing acceptance of collec- 
tive bargaining by providing a method that 
should enable it to meet the objections of its 
critics and to aggregate around this the forces 
of conciliation and arbitration now in such wide 
use. It has sought to do this without legal re- 
pression but with the organized pressure of 
public opinion. 

To me there is no question that we should try 
the experiment of the perhaps longer road pro- 
posed by the Industrial Conference for the de- 
velopment of mutuality of relationship be- 
tween employer and employee, rather than to 
enter upon summary action of court decision 
that may both stifle the delicate adjustment of 

331 



HERBERT HOOVER 

industrial processes and cause serious conflict 
over human rights. We must all agree that 
those deficiencies in our social, economic and 
political structure which find solution through 
education and voluntary action of our people 
themselves are the solutions that endure. To 
me, the upbuilding of the sense of responsibil- 
itjr and of intelligence in each individual unit 
in the United States with the intervention of 
government only to promote the development 
of these relations, the suppression of domina- 
tion by any one group over another, is the basis 
upon which democracy must progress. 

Upon the solution of industrial peace and 
good will does the gradual lift of the standard 
of life of our whole people rest by increase in the 
material and intellectual output and its proper 
distribution among all of us. To me the philo- 
sophic background of solution lies in rigorous 
application to economic life of our tried na- 
tional ideal — the equality of opportunity and 
the preservation of industrial initiative; that 
is, the stimulation of every individual by his 
own effort to take that position in the commun- 
ity to which his abilities and character entitle 
him and the protection to him to attain that 
end. In the earlier days of our democracy, 
with its simpler economic life, we were con- 
cerned more with the application of this ideal 

332 



APPENDIX III 

in its social and political phases. It has been 
so long and firmly established there that it is 
no longer a matter of discussion. With the 
growth of greater complexity in our economic 
life, its practical application to the sharing in 
the material and intellectual output in propor- 
tion to effort, ability, and character, becomes 
more difficult. It must, nevertheless, be ad- 
hered to if the ideal of our democracy is not 
to be abandoned. 

I do not believe we can attain this equality 
of opportunity or maintain initiative through 
crystallization of economic classes or groups 
arraigned against each other, exerting their 
interest by economic and political conflicts, nor 
can we attain it by transferring to governmen- 
tal bureaucracies the distribution of material 
and intellectual products. I do believe that 
we can attain it by systematic prevention of 
domination of the few over the many and 
stimulation of individual effort in the whole 
mass. 

It is well enough to hold a philosophic 
view, but the problems of day to day that 
arise under it are very practical problems that 
require concrete solution, and the employment 
relation is one of them. 



APPENDIX IV 

SOME NOTES ON AGRICULTURAL READJUSTMENT 
AND THE HIGH COST OF LIVING 1 

By Herbert Hoover 

The high cost of living is a temporary eco- 
nomic problem, surrounded by high emotions. 
The agricultural industry is a permanent eco- 
nomic problem, surrounded by many dangers. 
We are now entering into our regular four- 
year period of large promises to sufferers of 
all kinds. Except to demagogues and to the 
fellows who farm the farmer, there are no easy 
formulas; nevertheless, there are constructive 
forces that can be put in motion — and these 
are good times to get them talked about. 

As bearing upon some suggestion of con- 
structive solution, I wish to establish and ana- 
lyze certain propositions. Amongst other 
things they involve a clear understanding of 
the bearings of different segments of the total 

1 Saturday Evening Post, Issue April 10, 1920. 

334 



APPENDIX IV 

price of food between the different links in the 
chain of production and distribution. These 
propositions are: 

First: That the high cost of living is due 
largely to inflation and shortage in world pro- 
duction; speculation is an incident of these 
forces, not the cause. 

Second: That the farmer's prices are fixed 
by the impact of world wholesale prices; that 
such prices bear only a remote relation to his 
costs of production. 

Third: That any increase or decrease in the 
cost of placing the farmer's products into the 
hands of the wholesaler is a deduction from or 
addition to the farmer's prices; that is, an ex- 
pansion or contraction of the margin between 
the farm and wholesale prices makes an in- 
crease or decrease in the farmer's return. 

Fourth: That increase or decrease in the 
cost of distributing food from the wholesaler 
to the door of the ultimate consumer is a de- 
duction or addition predominantly to the con- 
sumer's cost; that is, the margin between the 
wholesaler and consumer in its increases or 
decreases is largely an addition or subtraction 
from the consumer's price. 

Fifth : That these two margins in most of our 
commodities except grain were, before the war, 
the largest in the world ; that they have grown 

335 



HERBERT HOOVER 

abnormally during the war, except during the 
year of food control. 

Sixth: That analysis of the character of the 
margin between the farmer and wholesaler will 
show that decreases in price find immediate 
reflection on the farmer, while immediate in- 
creases in price are absorbed by the trades be- 
tween and the farmer gets but a lagging in- 
crease. 

Seventh: That an analysis of these margins 
will show that they can be constructively di- 
minished but that, regrettable as it is, the prose- 
cution of profiteers will not do it. 

Eighth: That the problem must be solved, if 
our agriculture is to be maintained and if the 
balance between agriculture and general in- 
dustry is to be preserved so as to prevent our 
becoming dependent upon imports for food, 
with a train of industrial and national dangers. 

Present Prices Due to Inflation and 
Shortage in World Production 

Our war inflation does not lie so much 
in our increased gold and currency. Our 
currency per capita has increased by per- 
haps 25 or 30 per cent, but, compared to 
European practice of currency inflations of 
200 to 800 per cent, our conduct has been 

336 



APPENDIX IV 



provident indeed. This is not, however, the 
real area of inflation. It lies in the expan- 
sion of our bank credits. If we exclude the 
savings bank as not being credit institutions 
in the ordinary sense, and if we compile the 
commercial bank deposits, we still no doubt 
gather in some real savings, but nevertheless 
the figures show a considerable color of inflation 
somewhere. No one need think we have got- 
ten so suddenly rich as the money complexion 
of these figures might indicate. At the outset 
it should be emphasized that all figures of this 
kind are subject to dispute and interpretation; 
but, after all such deductions, the indication of 
tendencies remains. 



Year 



Bank Deposits 
Total 



Per Cent 

Change 

from 1913 



1913 


11,390,918,596 


100.0 


1914 


11,974,760,593 


105.1 


1915 


12,282,097,638 


107.8 


1916 


15,398,090,701 


135.2 


1917 


18,444,103,496 


161.9 


1918 


20,425,067,839 


179.3 


1919 


24,971,784,000 


219.2 



It will be accepted at once that the volume of 
bank deposits must grow with increased com- 
modity production and therefore we may 
roughly examine into this as well. If we com- 
bine the tonnage productivity of agriculture, 
metals, coal, salt, cement, lumber and the quar- 

337 



HERBERT HOOVER 

ries, we shall cover the great bulk of our prod- 
ucts. These figures also must be taken as 
merely indicating the tendencies of the times. 



Year 



Production 
in Tons 



Per Cent 

Change 

from 1913 



1913 


1,081,293,417 


100.0 


1914 


1,019,018,207 


94.2 


1915 


1,073,472,988 


99.3 


1916 


1,162,489,530 


107.5 


1917 


1,241,173,806 


114.8 


1918 


1,247,787,883 


115.4 


1919 


1,117,181,233 


103.3 



If we attach the index of prices during these 
periods and compare them with the per cent 
variation in commodity production and bank 
deposits, we have the following interesting 
parallels : 









Department 




Per Cent 


Per Cent 


of Labor 




Change in 


Change in 


Wholesale 




Production 


Bank Deposits 


Index 


Year 


from 1913 


from 1913 


of All 

Commodities 



1913 


100.0 


100.0 


100.0 


1914 


94.2 


105.1 


99.3 


1915 


99.3 


107.8 


100.5 


1916 


107.5 


135.2 


120.5 


1917 


114.8 


161.9 


175.9 


1918 


115.4 


179.3 


196.6 


1919 


103.3 


219.2 


214.5 



Two different extreme schools of economics 
will interpret these tables differently. One will 

338 



APPENDIX IV 

hold that the increase in credit and money must 
influence prices in exact ratio. The other will 
hold the rise of prices as due to shortage in 
production, either at home or abroad, and that 
rise in price necessitates an increase in credits 
and money to carry on commerce. Both are 
probably right, for short production and infla- 
tion probably alternatively serve as cause and 
effect. The first school has some claims upon 
the large volume of gold we imported the first 
three years of the war and multiplied into 
credits — as the cause prior to our coming into 
the war. They can also point out that our 
Treasury and banks deliberately inflated bank 
credits in order to place war loans and that if 
this form of credits was removed our expan- 
sion would be nothing like its present volume. 
As necessary as it may have been to use this 
method in securing quick money at a low rate 
during the war, there are the strongest objec- 
tions to it since the armistice was signed. If 
our post-war finance at least had been secured 
from savings by offering sufficiently attractive 
terms, the inflation would be less although 
the market price of Liberty Bonds might 
be lower. 

That short world production has been one 
of the causes of rising prices cannot be denied. 
The warring powers of Europe took 60,000,- 

339 



HERBERT HOOVER 

000 men from production (nearly one third 
their productive man power) and put it to de- 
struction. They have lived to a great degree 
by gain of commodities from the United 
States, and thus brought their shortage to our 
shores. They have not yet altogether recovered 
from the holidays of victory, the gloom of de- 
feat, the persuasive "isms" that would find pro- 
duction without work, the destruction of their 
economic unity, transportation, credits, and 
other fundamentals necessary to maintain pro- 
duction. It will be some time before they do 
recover. In the meantime, they are perforce 
reducing their consumption — their standard of 
living — because they have largely exhausted 
their securities, commodities or credit to con- 
tinue the borrowing of our commodities for 
their own short production, as during the war. 
The exchange barometer is today witness of 
the end of this procedure of living on borrowed 
money. In passing, it may be mentioned that 
exchange is no more a cause of their inability 
to buy from us than is the barometer the cause 
of blizzards. The storm is that they have mostly 
exhausted their credits and they have not re- 
covered production so as to offer commodities 
to us in exchange for ours. 

Our own industrial production, as distin- 
guished from agricultural production, has 

340 



APPENDIX IV 

fallen rapidly since the armistice. Some of the 
fall is due to war weariness, some to "isms" 
that have infected us from Europe, some to 
the natural abandonment of high cost produc- 
tion brought into play during the war, some 
to strikes and a host of other wastes. Our con- 
sumption has greatly increased since the re- 
straints of war. Decrease had not penetrated 
our agricultural community up to 1919 har- 
vest, nor will such decrease arise from these 
causes, but as I will set out later, forces are en- 
tering that will decrease our agricultural pro- 
duction. Our production in nearly all impor- 
tant food commodities except sugar is in sur- 
plus of our own need. It only becomes a short- 
age affecting prices under the drain of exports. 
Therefore, it is the world shortage that is af- 
fecting our price levels, and not, so far, a 
deficiency for our needs. 

So far as relief from price influence by short- 
age in production is concerned, it may arise in 
two ways. First, slowly through gradual re- 
cuperation in world production. Second, by 
compulsory reduction of consumption in Eu- 
rope through their inability to pay us by com- 
modities, gold or credits. This latter has been 
very evident through the drop in exchange and 
engagements for export during the past few 
weeks. 

341 



HERBERT HOOVER 

The Three Divisions oe the Price 

The cost of food to the consumer is divided 
among the farmers on one hand and storage, 
manufacture, jobbers, wholesalers, retailers 
and transportation on the other. I believe these 
charges between the farmer and consumer fall 
into two distinct groups — the charges compris- 
ing the margin between the farmer and whole- 
saler which mainly concern the farmer, and 
charges between the wholesaler and consumer, 
which mainly concern the consumer. To es- 
tablish this division, it is necessary to analyze 
shortly the datum point by which price is 
determined. 

The diet of the American people from a nu- 
tritional (not financial) standpoint comprises 
the following articles and proportion: 

Wheat and Rye 29.5% 

Pork Products 15.7% 

Dairy Products 15.3% 

Beef Products 5.3% 

Corn Products 7.0% 

Sugar Products 13.2% 

Vegetable Oils 3.6% 89.6% 

ATI other, including potatoes 10.4% 

100.0%? 

The wholesale price of about 90 per cent of 
our food in normal times is only remotely de- 

342 



APPENDIX IV 

termined by the cost of production, but mostly 
by world conditions. We export a surplus of 
most commodities among the 90 per cent and 
the prices of exports are determined by com- 
petition with other world supplies in the Euro- 
pean wholesale markets. Those items in this 
90 per cent that we do not export are influ- 
enced by the same forces, because in normal 
times we import them on any considerable 
variation in price and the wholesaler naturally 
buys in the cheapest market. Even milk is to a 
considerable degree controlled by butter im- 
ports in normal times. When we import but- 
ter it releases more milk in competition. This 
cannot be said to such extent of most of the 
odd 10 per cent, because they are largely per- 
ishables that do not stand overseas transport 
and consequently rise and fall more nearly di- 
rectly upon local supply and demand. Some 
economists will at once argue that if prices are 
unprofitable to the farmer the situation will 
correct itself by diminished production and, 
consequently, a general rise in the world level 
of prices. In the abstract, this is true, but. as 
a matter of fact the surplus which our farmers 
contribute for export is only a small portion 
of their total production or of the world pool, 
yet the total of the world pool operating through 
this minor segment makes the prices for a large 

343 



HERBERT HOOVER 

part of the farmers' commodities. Therefore, 
the effect in normal times of restriction in 
production in any one country does not affect 
price so much as theoretic argument would 
believe. The farmer must plant if he would 
live, and he must plant long in advance of 
his knowledge of prices or world production. 
He can make no contracts in advance of his 
planting, nor can he cease operations on the 
day prices fall too low. He is driven on, 
year after year, in hope and necessity, and 
will continue over long periods with a stan- 
dard of return below rightful living because 
he has no other course — and always has hopes. 
He will vary fairly rapidly from one com- 
modity to another — from wheat to other 
grains, for instance — but he mostly raises 
his maximum of something. In the long 
run of decreasing prices he would undoubtedly 
reach so low a standard as to cease production. 
Then comes a comparatively short period of 
higher prices in some commodity; production 
is again stimulated and followed by long 
intervals of low standards. As shown by 
the following table, on the whole, the farmer 
has not been underpaid during the war, but 
the currents again are turning against 
him. 

It will be seen that the farmer enjoyed prices 
344 



APPENDIX IV 



Department of Labor 
Wholesale Index of 
All Commodities 



Index of Prices at the 

Farm in Principal 

Produce States 



<;0h 



K 



u 



o 
U 



Pre-war 


100 

187 


100 

200 


100 
213 


100 
224 


100 
254 


100 


First Quarter 1918... 


246 


Last Quarter 1918... 


206 


204 


223 


220 


258 


246 


First Quarter 1919 . . . 


200 


202 


225 


228 


264 


215 


Last Quarter 1919... 


230 


206 


178 


216 


277 


268 



equivalent to or higher than the general level 
up to the last six months. He is now, however, 
falling behind in some important products. 
Unlike the industrial workers, he is unable to 
demand an adjustment of his income to the 
changed index of living. 

For the moment, what I wish to estab- 
lish is only that the farmer's prices are not 
based upon any conception of the cost of 
production, but upon forces in which he has 
no voice. He can never organize to put his 
industry in a "cost plus" basis as industrial 
producers do, and remedy must be found 
elsewhere. 

The Two Margins 

As stated, the margin between the farmer 
and consumer falls into two divisions — one of 

345 



HERBERT HOOVER 

which predominantly affects the farmer and 
the other the consumer. It is really the whole- 
sale prices that govern the farmer, rather than 
retail prices, for it is in wholesale prices that 
the farmer competes with the world. As the 
prices paid by the wholesaler are mostly fixed 
by overseas trade at the datum point on the 
Atlantic seaboard or in Europe, then if the 
margins between the wholesaler and the farmer 
are unduly large, or increase, it is mostly to 
the farmer's detriment. For instance, as the 
price of the farmer's wheat in normal times 
is made in Liverpool, any increase in handling 
comes out of the farmer's price. Likewise, 
as the wholesale price of butter is made by 
the import of Danish butter into New York, 
any increase in the numbers or charges between 
our farmer and the wholesale buyer comes, to a 
considerable degree, out of the farmer. 

As the datum point of determining prices 
is at the wholesaler, the accretion by the 
charges for distribution from that point for- 
ward to the consumer's door will not affect the 
farmer, but will affect the consumer. When 
competition decreases through shortage the 
consumer pays the added profits of these trades. 

Studies of the cost of our distribution sys- 
tem, made by the Food Administration during 
the war, established two prime conditions. The 

346 



APPENDIX IV 

first is that the margins between our farmers 
and the wholesaler in commodities other than 
grain in some instances, are, even in normal 
times, the highest in any civilized state — fully 
25 per cent higher than in most European 
countries. The expensiveness of our chain of 
distribution in most commodities in normal 
times, as compared to Continental countries, is 
due partly to the wide distances of the produc- 
ing areas from the dominating consuming areas, 
but there are other contributing causes that can 
be remedied. In Europe, the great public 
markets in the cities bring farmer and consumer 
closely together in many commodities, but in 
the United States the bulk of products are too 
far afield for this. The farmer must market 
through a long chain of manufacturers, brok- 
ers, jobbers and wholesalers with or without 
their own distribution system, who must es- 
tablish a clientele of direct retailers; and thus 
public markets, except in special locations and 
in comparatively few commodities, have not 
been successful. Another major factor in our 
cost of distribution is the increasing demand 
for expensive service by our consumers. There 
are many other factors that bear on the problem 
and the economic results of our system which 
are discussed, together with some suggestion 
of remedy, later on. 

347 



HERBERT HOOVER 

The second result of these studies was to 
show the great widening of this margin during 
the war. During the year of the Food Admin- 
istration's active restraint on this margin, 
there was an advance of six points in the whole- 
sale index while the farmer's index moved up 
25 points. Both before and after that period 
the two indexes moved up together. The same 
can be said of the margins between the whole- 
saler and the consumer. Taking the period of 
the war as a whole, the margin between the 
farmer and consumer has widened to an ex- 
travagant degree. 

A good instance of a movement in margins 
is shown in flour in 1917. The farmer's aver- 
age return for wheat of the 1916 harvest, as 
shown by the Department of Agriculture, was 
about $1.42. As about four and one-half bush- 
els of wheat are required to make a barrel of 
flour, the farmer's share of the receipts from 
this harvest was about $6.40 per barrel. In 
1917, before the Food Administration came 
into being, flour rose to $17.50 per barrel to 
the consumer, or, at that time, a margin of 
$1 1 .00 per barrel. During the Administration, 
the farmer received an average of about $2.00 
for wheat at the farm, or about $9.00 out of a 
barrel of flour. The consumer paid $12.50, the 
margin being about $3.50 per barrel. 

348 



APPENDIX IV 



This increase in margins shows vividly in the 
higher priced foods, for instance, pork prod- 
ucts. If we take hogs at the railway station 
over the great hog states contiguous to Chi- 
cago as a basis, we find: 







Price of 






Price of Hogs 


Cured Prod- 


Margin 


Six 


in Principal 


ucts to Con- 


Between 


Months 


States 


sumer from 


Farmer and 




Per 100 Lbs. 


100 Lbs. Hogs 


Consumer 


1914 


$7.45 


$18.97 


$11.52 


1919 


16.27 


37.33 


21.06 


1920 


15.37 


37.71 


22.34 



Thus, while the farmer has gained about 
$7.92 in his price, the margin has increased by 
$10.82 to the consumer and, incidentally, dur- 
ing the last year since food control restraints 
were removed, the consumer has paid $.30 more 
while the farmer got $.90 less. These instances 
could be greatly multiplied. 

It is unfortunate that our national statistics 
do not permit a complete analysis of the distri- 
bution of margin between all the various 
groups in the chain between the farmer and 
consumer in different commodities. It would 
be helpful if we could take the farmers, rail- 
ways, manufacturers, wholesalers and retail- 
ers, and determine what proportion each re- 
ceives. 

These margins between farmer and consumer 
349 



HERBERT HOOVER 

are made up of a necessary chain of charges for 
transport, storage, manufacture and distribu- 
tion. The great majority of citizens who are 
engaged in the processes that go to make up 
this portion of food costs are employed in an ob- 
viously essential economic function, and they do 
not approach it in a spirit of criminality, but as 
a very necessary, proper, and honorable func- 
tion. They have, since the European War be- 
gan, rather over-enjoyed the result of economic 
forces that were not of their own creation. 
That a considerable margin is necessary to 
cover the legitimate costs of, and profits on, dis- 
tribution is obvious. The only direction of 
inquiry is how they can be legitimately mini- 
mized. These margins, starting from the un- 
duly high expense of a faulty system, have in- 
creased not only legitimately, due to increased 
transportation, labor, rent, taxes, and in- 
creased interest upon the large capital re- 
quired, but they have, except during the period 
of control, increased unduly beyond these ne- 
cessities. There are two general character- 
istics of this margin that are of some interest. 
In the first instance, all of the transport, stor- 
age, manufacture and handling is conducted 
upon a basis of cost plus either fixed returns or, 
as is more usually the case, a percentage of 
profit upon the whole cost of operation. Any 

350 



APPENDIX IV 

distributing agency ceases to operate when it 
does not secure costs and a profit. Conse- 
quently, all those links put up a resistance to 
a curtailment of the margin which the farmer 
is unable, except by absolute exhaustion, to put 
against reduction of his price levels. If rapid 
falls in food prices occur, the farmer, at least 
in the first instance, has to stand most of the 
fall because he cannot quit. The farmer's costs 
of production relate to a period long prior to 
the fall. Thus, if wages are due to fall as a 
result of a fall in food prices, the farmer is 
always selling on the old basis of his costs. The 
farmer has but one turn-over in the year. The 
middleman has several and can thus adjust 
himself quickly. 

Second, the custom of many of these busi- 
nesses is to operate upon a percentage of profit 
on the value of the commodities handled, even 
after deducting all their increased costs, inter- 
est or other charges. When we have rising 
prices, therefore, a doubling of prices, for in- 
stance, tends to double profits on the same vol- 
ume of commodities handled. In a rising mar- 
ket, competitive pressures are much diminished 
and the dealer can assess his own profits to 
greater degree than usual. While the packers 
make a profit of, say, two cents on the dollar 
value of commodities, it represents double the 

351 



HERBERT HOOVER 

profit per pound over pre-war, even after al- 
lowing such items as interest on the larger 
capital involved. 

Reductions of the Margins 

Aside from the necessary rise in the margin 
that has grown out of the rise in cost of labor, 
rent, etc., from inflation and world shortage, 
there are some causes which have accumulated 
to increase the margins between the farmer and 
the wholesaler and the wholesaler and consumer 
that could be greatly mitigated. 

Better Tax Distribution 

During the war, in order to restrain wild 
greed and profiteering in the then existing 
unlimited demand, margins between pur- 
chase and sale in the different manufacturing 
and handling trades were fixed in all the 
great commodities — iron, steel, cement, lum- 
ber, coal and foodstuffs. The first task of 
the war was to secure production, and 
the margins were therefore fixed at such 
breadth as would allow the smaller high cost 
manufacturer and the smaller dealer to live. 
Otherwise, the smaller competitors would have 
been extinguished, production would have been 
lost, and, worse yet, the larger low-cost opera- 

352 



APPENDIX IV 

tor would have been left with much inflated 
monopoly. The excess profits tax was levied 
as a sequent corrective to this necessary first 
step, so as to take the undue profits of the large 
producer back to the public. It was a wise 
war measure, but the moment restraints on 
profits were taken off and there was a free and 
rising market ahead, then the tax was added to 
prices by all the participants and passed on 
to the consumer, or deducted from the farmer 
when world levels crowded his prices down. 
It should have been repealed at the time the 
controls were abandoned, but our legislatures 
have been busy with other things and, in the 
meanwhile, in food it not only increases the 
margin between the farmer and the consumer 
but tends, as stated above, to come out of the 
farmer to a large degree. It has other vicious 
results in that it also stimulates dealers and 
manufacturers to speculate their profits away 
in unsound business, rather than to pay 
it to the government. It does sound well 
to tax the great manufacturers, but to make 
them the agency to collect taxes from the 
population is not altogether sound govern- 
ment. 

It is a very important tax to the Govern- 
ment, bringing as it does over a billion a year, 
and a place to put this load is not to be found 

353 



HERBERT HOOVER 

easily. The income tax does not have so malign 
an effect, for it comes to a great extent from the 
individual and not from business. The present 
method of income tax, however, has some weak- 
nesses. The same levy is made upon earned 
incomes as upon those that are unearned. The 
tax on earned incomes tends in certain cases 
to be passed on to the consumer or deducted 
from the farmer, and, besides, it is not just 
that a family living by giving productive ser- 
vice to the community should pay the same as 
a family that contributes nothing by way of 
effort. A stiff tax on these latter families might 
send them to work, and certainly would induce 
economy. Moreover, the earner of income must 
provide for old age and dependents while the 
unearned income taxpayer has this provision 
already. Altogether, it would seem the 
part of Avisdom at least to increase the income 
tax on the larger unearned income and de- 
crease it on the earners. It is argued that 
this drives great incomes to evasion by 
investment in tax-free securities, which is 
probably true. We need more comparative 
figures than the Treasury statistics yet show 
to answer this point. In any event, relief to 
the earner would free his savings to invest in 
taxable securities and we need above all things 
to stimulate the initiative of the saver. Income 

354 



APPENDIX IV 

taxes, except when too high on earned incomes, 
do not destroy initiative, and every other gov- 
ernment has, in taxing, recognized the essential 
difference between earned and unearned in- 
come. This distinction would generally relieve 
the range of smaller incomes, for they are 
mostly earned. 

The inheritance tax has not been fully 
exploited as yet. It cannot be deducted from 
either farmer or consumer, it does not affect 
the cost of living, it does not destroy initiative 
in the individual if it leaves large and proper 
residues for dependents. It does redistribute 
overswollen fortunes. It does make for equal- 
ity of opportunity by freeing the dead hand 
from control of our tools of production. It 
reduces extravagance in the next generation, 
and sends them to constructive service. It has 
a theoretic economic objection of being a dis- 
persal of capital into income in the hands of 
the government, but so long as the govern- 
ment spends an equal amount on redemption 
of the debt or productive works, even this argu- 
ment no longer stands. 

We may need to come to some sort of in- 
creased consumption taxes in order to lift that 
part of excess profits and tax on earned incomes 
that cannot be very properly placed elsewhere. 
When it comes, it should lie on other commodi- 

355 



HERBERT HOOVER 

ties than food, except perhaps sugar, one half 
of which is a luxury consumption. The ideal 
would be for it to be levied wholly on non- 
essentials in order that it should be a burden on 
luxury and not on necessity. There is no doubt 
difficulty in classifying. Jewelry and furs are 
easy to class, but where necessity leaves off and 
luxury begins in trousers is more difficult to 
determine. 

It requires no lengthy economic or moral 
argument as a platform for denunciation of 
all waste and useless expenditure. Some sane 
medium is needed between comfort and luxury. 
Failing definition, and objection to blue laws, 
the theme must be taken into the area of moral 
virtues and become a proper subject for the 
spiritual stimulations of the church. There is 
a psychology in luxury wherein we all buy 
high-priced things because they are high-priced, 
not because they add comfort — and this has 
contributed also to our high cost of living, for 
those who do it drive up prices on those who 
try to avoid it. From an economic point of 
view, the only recipes are taxation as a device 
to make it expensive. 

More constructive than increasing taxes is 
to take a holiday on governmental expendi- 
tures and relieve the taxpayer generally. If 
we could stave off a lot of expensive sugges- 

356 



APPENDIX IV 

tions for a few years and secure more efficiency 
in what we must spend, then our people could 
get ahead with the process of earning some- 
thing to be taxed. This would at least be com- 
forting to the great farming and business com- 
munity. 

Better Transportation Facilities 

There is a great weakness in our present 
railway situation bearing upon the farmer and 
consumer. Everyone knows of the annual 
shortage of cars during the crop -moving sea- 
son. Few people, however, appreciate that this 
shortage of cars often amounts to a stricture in 
the free flow of commodities from the farmer 
to the consumer. The result is that the farmer, 
in order to sell his produce, often unknown to 
himself makes a sacrifice in price to local glut. 
The consumer is compelled at the other end 
to pay an increased price for foodstuffs due to 
the shortage in movement. The constant 
fluctuations in our grain exchanges locally or 
generally from this cause are matters of pub- 
lic record almost monthly. On one occasion a 
study was made under my administration into 
the effect of car shortage in the transportation 
of potatoes, and we could demonstrate by chart 
and figures that the margin between the farmer 

357 



HERBERT HOOVER 

and the consumer broadened 100 per cent in 
periods of car shortage. Nor did the middle- 
man make this whole margin of profit, because 
he was subjected to unusual losses and destruc- 
tion, and took unusual risks in awaiting a mar- 
ket. The same phenomenon was proved in a 
large way at time of acute shortage of move- 
ment in corn and other grains. 

The usual remedy for this situation is insis- 
tence that the railways shall provide ample 
rolling stock, trackage and terminals to take 
care of the annual peakload. We have fallen 
far behind in the provision of even normal rail- 
way equipment during the war and an addi- 
tional 500,000 cars and locomotives are no 
doubt needed. Above a certain point, however, 
this imposes upon the railways a great invest- 
ment in equipment for use during a compara- 
tively short period of the year when many com- 
modities synchronize to make the peak move- 
ment. The railways naturally wish to spread 
the movement over a longer period. The bur- 
den of equipment for short time use will prob- 
ably prevent their ever being able to take entire 
care of the annual delays in transport and stric- 
ture in market, although it can be greatly mini- 
mized. 

There is possible help in handling the peak 
load by improving the waterways from the 

358 



n ii *»r i 



APPENDIX IV 

Great Lakes to the Atlantic seaboard by way 
of the St. Lawrence River, so as to pass full 
seagoing cargoes. It has already been deter- 
mined that the project is entirely feasible and 
of comparatively moderate cost. The result 
would be to place every port on the Great 
Lakes on the seas. Fifteen states contiguous 
to the Lakes could find an outlet for a portion 
of their annual surplus quickly and more 
cheaply to the overseas markets than through 
the congested eastern trunk rail lines. It would 
contribute materially to reduce this effectual 
stricture in the free flow of the farmer's com- 
modities to the consumers. Of far greater im- 
portance, however, is the fact that the costs of 
transportation from the Lake ports to Europe 
would be greatly diminished and this dimin- 
ished cost would go directly into the farmer's 
pockets. It is my belief that there is a possible 
saving here of five or six cents a bushel in the 
transportation of grain. Although a compara- 
tively small proportion of our total grain 
production flows to Europe, I believe that the 
economic lift on this minor portion would 
raise the price of the whole grain production 
by the amount saved in transportation of this 
portion of it. The price of export wheat, 
rye, and barley — sometimes corn — usually 
hogs — in Chicago at normal times is the 

359 



HERBERT HOOVER 

Liverpool price, less transportation and other 
charges, and if we decrease the transport in 
a free market the farmer should get the 
difference. Not only should there be great 
benefits to the agricultural population, but 
it should be a real benefit to our railways in 
getting them a better average load without the 
cost of maintaining the surplus equipment and 
personnel necessary to manage the peakload 
during the fall months. It has been computed 
that the capital saving in rolling stock alone 
would pay for the entire cost of this waterway 
improvement over a comparatively few years. 
The matter also becomes of national importance 
in finding employment for the great national 
mercantile fleet that we have created during 
these years of war. 

Another factor in transportation bearing 
upon the problem of marketing is the control 
by food manufacturing and marketing con- 
cerns of refrigeration and other special types 
of cars. This special control has grown up 
largely because, owing to seasonal changes in 
regional occupation for these cars over differ- 
ent parts of the country, no one railway wished 
to provide sufficient special cars and service 
for use that may come its way only part of the 
year. The result has been to force the building 
up of a domination by certain concerns who 

360 



APPENDIX IV 

control many of the cars and stifle free compe- 
tition. Much the same results have been at- 
tained by special groups in control of stock 
yards and, in some cases, of elevators. Where 
such formal or informal monopolies grow up, 
they are public utilities, and if the farmer is to 
have a free market they must be replaced by 
constructive public service. 

A Free Market 

Every impediment to free marketing in 
produce either gives special privileges or in- 
creases the risks which the farmer must pay 
for in diminished returns. We have some com- 
modities where manufacture has grown into 
such units that these units exert such an in- 
fluence that they consciously or unconsciously 
affect the price levels of the farmer's produce. 
When a few concerns have the duty of manu- 
facturing and storing the seasonal reserves in 
a single commodity they naturally reduce 
prices during the heavy production season and 
increase them in the short season as a method 
of diminishing their risk and increasing profits. 
Moreover, their tendency is often to sell the 
minor portion of their product that goes for 
export at lower than the domestic price in 
order to dispose of it without depressing local 
prices. They do not need to conspire, for 

361 



HERBERT HOOVER 

there can be perfectly coincident action to meet 
the same economic currents. Such coincidence 
has much greater possibilities of general influ- 
ence with a few concerns in the field than if 
there were many. 

The experience gained in the Food Admin- 
istration on these problems during the war led 
to the feeling expressed at that time, that such 
business should be confined to one line of activ- 
ity, just as we have had to confine our railways, 
banks and insurance companies. This is use- 
ful to prevent reliance being placed upon the 
profits of alternative products when engaged 
in stifling of competition, through selling be- 
low cost on some other item. Even this restric- 
tion may not prove to be sufficient protection 
to free market by free competition. I am not 
a believer in nationalization as the solution to 
this form of domination, but I am a believer in 
regulation, if it should prove necessary. If 
experience proves we have to go to regulation, 
it is my belief that it should be confined to over- 
swollen units and that the point of departure 
should not be the amount of capital employed 
but the proportion of a given commodity that 
is controlled. The point of departure must 
depend upon the special commodity and its 
ratio to the whole. When such a concern ob- 
tains such dimensions that it can influence 

362 



APPENDIX IV 

prices or dominate public affairs, either with 
deliberation or innocence, then it must be placed 
under regulation and restraint. Our people 
have long since realized the advantage of large 
business operation in improving and cheapen- 
ing the costs of manufacture and distribution, 
but when these operations have become so en- 
larged that they are able to dominate the com- 
munity, it becomes of social necessity that they 
shall be made responsible to the community. 
The test that should apply, therefore, is not 
the size of the institution or the volume of capi- 
tal that it employs, but the proportion of the 
commodity that it controls in its operations. 
It is my belief that if this were made the datum 
point for regulation, and if regulation were 
made of a rigorous order, this pressure would 
result in such business keeping below the limit 
of regulation. Thus the automatic result 
would be the building up of a proper com- 
petition, because men in manufacturing would 
rather conduct a smaller business free of 
governmental regulation than enjoy large 
operations subject to governmental control. 
There are probably only a very few con- 
cerns in the United States that would fall 
into this category, and they should be glad 
of regulation in order to secure freedom from 
criticism. 

363 



HERBERT HOOVER 

Speculation and Profiteering 

There are three kinds of speculation and 
profiteering in the food trades. The first is 
of the inherent speculative character of food- 
stuffs due to their seasonal nature. The farmer, 
more by habit than necessary, usually markets 
the bulk of his grain in the fall. By necessity 
he must market his animals at certain seasons 
for they must be bred at certain seasonal 
periods, they must be fed at certain seasons, 
and thus they come to market in waves of pro- 
duction larger than the immediate demand. 
In perishables he must market fairly promptly 
as he cannot himself maintain necessary special 
types of storage. Thus, the dealer must specu- 
late on carrying the commodities for distribu- 
tion during the period of short production 
while the farmer markets in time of surplus 
production. While full competitive conditions 
might reduce the charges for this hazard, there 
is a possibility of reducing the hazard by bet- 
ter organization and, consequently, the charge 
for the hazard that is now debited to the far- 
mer. It is worth an exhaustive national in- 
vestigation to determine whether an extension 
of a system of central markets would not afford 
great help. I do not mean the extension of our 
so-called exchanges dealing in local produce, 

364 



APPENDIX IV 

but the creation of great central exchange mar- 
kets with responsibilities for service to the en- 
tire people. This help would arise in two ways. 
The first is the hourly determination of price at 
great centers that all may know, and thus the 
farmer protects himself against local variations 
and manipulation. The second is a system of 
forward contracts through such a market be- 
tween farmer and consumer on standardized 
commodities. Such contracts in effect remove 
the necessity of a speculative middleman. This 
system exists in grain and in cotton and in its 
processes eliminates large part of the haz- 
ard and carries the commodity at the lower 
rate of interest. The present trouble with the 
system of future contracts is that, it lends it- 
self to manipulation, but I believe this could 
be eliminated. 

Take the case of potatoes; here is an 
unstandardized, seasonal commodity, with no 
national market and therefore no established 
daily price as a datum point. A grower in 
Florida, Maine, or Wisconsin, through a local 
agent, or through local sale, consigns potatoes 
to Pittsburgh because a larger price is reported 
there than in Chicago. The grower can usu- 
ally make no actual sale to an actual retailer or 
wholesaler at destination because the buyer has 
no assurance of quality. Coincident shipment 

365 



HERBERT HOOVER 

from many points to a hopeful market almost 
daily produces a local glut at receiving points 
somewhere in the country. Often enough the 
shipper gets no return but a bill for freight and 
the perishables sometimes rot in the yards. If 
potatoes were standardized and sold on con- 
tract in national market, protected from ma- 
nipulation, three things should result. First, 
there would be a daily national price known to 
growers. Second, by the sale of a contract for 
delivery the grower would be assured of this 
price. Third, the contract and directions for 
shipment would flow naturally to the distribu- 
tor where the potatoes were needed, and thus 
the present fearfully wasteful system would 
be mitigated. Potatoes would be a most dif- 
ficult case to handle; dried beans, peas, even 
butter and cheese would be easier. I am not 
advocating widespread dealing in futures, but 
short contracts giving time for delivery would 
probably greatly decrease the margin between 
farmer and local distributor by saving great 
wastes in transport, in spoilage and in manipu- 
lation. 

The second class of speculation is one largely 
of the war as a period of rising prices growing 
out of inflation, and so forth. It lies in the 
marking up of goods on the shelf to the level 
of the rising daily market. This marking up 

366 



APPENDIX IV 

has been one of the large factors in increasing 
the margin during the war. No better exam- 
ple exists than the rise of flour during the 1916- 
1917 harvest year, referred to elsewhere. We 
shall have a remedy for this the moment the 
tide of inflation turns. The farmer and con- 
sumer cannot, however, expect that they will 
get even during such a reverse period for their 
losses on the rise, because the trades have too 
great an individual power of resistance against 
selling goods at a loss. Anyway, the mark- 
ing up of goods will cease when prices cease 
to rise — and there is a limit. 

The third class of speculation is wholly vi- 
cious. That is the purchase of foodstuffs, in 
times of rising economic levels, sheerly for the 
rise in price or the deliberate manipulation of 
markets during normal times. These opera- 
tions are against the common welfare; they 
can find no moral or economic justification. 
They are not to be reached by prosecution; 
they must be reached by prevention. Our great 
boards of trade in fine patriotic spirit proved 
their ability during the war to control delib- 
erate manipulation of grain and other fu- 
tures. 

The two latter types of speculation are 
an impediment to free markets and they be- 
come an unnecessary charge on the margin. 

867 



HERBERT HOOVER 



Co-operative Marketing by the Farmer 

There can be no question of the improvement 
in position of both farmer and consumer in 
cases where cooperative marketing can be or- 
ganized. The high development of coopera- 
tive citrus fruit marketing has resulted in lower 
average prices to consumer, better quality, and 
better return to the grower. Here is a case 
of scientific distribution lamentably absent in 
many other commodities. There are other 
specialized products to which it could be well 
extended. To reach its best development 
it should have parallel cooperative develop- 
ment among consumers as have we discussed 
elsewhere. 

Sundry Items 

There are many ways of assisting the agri- 
cultural industry not pertinent to this discus- 
sion on the cost of distribution. They do de- 
mand inquiry, and public illumination ; most of 
them do not demand legislation so much as 
public education and consideration when legis- 
lating on other subjects. Our agricultural in- 
terests also need a foreign policy. For in- 
stance, during the last month there has been 
a consolidation of control of buying in world 

368 



APPENDIX IV 

markets by the European Governments. How 
far it may be extended in its policies is not 
clear. Nevertheless, a combination of import- 
ers in all Europe under government control 
could determine the prices on every farm in the 
United States. 

The Margin Between the Wholesaler 
and Consumer 

As the datum point of price determination is 
the wholesaler's market, the accretions of 
charge for distribution from that point for- 
ward, the economy of extravagance in these 
costs, is of primary interest to the consumer. 
The same phenomena of marking up goods on 
the shelf, calculating profits not on commodi- 
ties but on dollars handled, a minor amount 
of vicious speculation, and the passing on 
of excess profits tax, are present in those trades 
during the past years. A much more pertinent 
phenomenon in unduly increasing their mar- 
gins is the increasing demands of the consumer 
as to service. Several deliveries daily, pur- 
chases on credit, the abandonment of the mar- 
ket basket in favor of the telephone, mean many 
costs. One of them much overlooked is that 
customers must always have "first" quality 
when they buy over the telephone, and the sec- 

369 



HERBERT HOOVER 

onds and thirds of equal food value in many 
commodities go to waste and are added to the 
price of the firsts. That there are some peo- 
ple in the United States who want to buy 
sanely is evidenced by the 400 per cent increase 
in "cash and carry" shops. There are also too 
many people in the final stages of distribution. 
One city in the United States has one meat re- 
tailer for every 400 inhabitants; it would be 
equally well served with one dealer for every 
1200. The result is high margin to the retailers 
and no out-of-the-way income to any of them. 
There is no very immediate remedy for this. 
One possibility is an extension of cooperative 
buying by consumers. It has proved a great 
success abroad. It isunot socialism, for it arises 
from voluntary action and initiative among the 
people themselves. 

Ill Balance of Agriculture and General 
Industry 

There is now a tendency to ill balance be*- 
tween the agricultural and general industry. 
For many years we were large exporters of 
food and importers of manufactured goods. 
We gradually imported mouths, manufactured 
our own goods and just as rapidly diminished 
our food exports. Up to the point where we 

370 



APPENDIX IV 

consumed our own food and manufactured our 
own goods it has been a great national devel- 
opment. Our annual exports of food decreased 
during the past twenty-five years from some 
15,000,000 tons to about 6,000,000 just before 
the European War. In the meantime we in- 
creased the import of such commodities as 
sugar, rice, vegetable oils, until our net ex- 
ports were about 5,000,000 tons. Of the kinds 
of food exported this probably represents a 
decreased export of from twenty-five or thirty 
per cent of our production down to five per 
cent of it. 

During the war we gave special stimulus to 
food production and produced greater econo- 
mies in consumption so that these later years 
somewhat befog the real current, for our agri- 
cultural surplus in normal years is really very 
small. During the war and since, we have 
given great stimulus to our manufacturing in- 
dustries. If we shall continue to build up our 
manufacturing industries and our export trade 
without corresponding encouragement to agri- 
culture, we will soon have more mouths in our 
country than we can feed on our own produce. 
We shall, like the European States which have 
devoted themselves to industrial development, 
ultimately become dependent upon overseas 
food supplies. If we examine their situation 

371 



HERBERT HOOVER 

we find the very life of their people is thus de- 
pendent upon maintaining open free access to 
overseas markets. From this necessity have 
grown the great naval armaments of the world, 
and the burden they imply on all sections of 
the population. Such nations, of necessity, 
have engaged in fierce competition for markets 
for their industrial products. Thus they built 
up the background of world conflicts. The ti- 
tanic struggles that have resulted have endan- 
gered the very lives of their people by star- 
vation. Their war tactics have, in large degree, 
been directed to strangle food supplies. One 
other result of this development is the terrible 
congestion of populations in manufacturing 
areas with all the social and human difficulties 
that this implies. 

There is a jeopardy in industrial over-de- 
velopment which has received too little atten- 
tion because the world has only experienced it 
during the past eighteen months. In times of 
industrial depression, or great increase in the 
cost of living, whether brought about by war 
or by the ebb and flow of world prosperitj^, 
these populations, oppressed with misery, turn 
to political remedies for matters that are be- 
yond human control. They naturally resent 
the lowering of their standards of living, and 
they inevitably resort to industrial strife, to 

372 



APPENDIX IV 

strikes and disorder. Theirs is the breeding 
ground of radicalism — for all such phenomena 
belong to the towns and not to the country. 

By and large, our industries are now in a 
high state of prosperity. More favorable hours, 
more favorable wages, are today offered in in- 
dustry than in agriculture. The industries are 
drawing the workers from our farms. If this 
balance in relative returns is to continue, we 
face a gradual decrease in our agricultural pro- 
ductivity. If we should develop our industrial 
side during the next five years as rapidly as 
we have during the past five years, we shall by 
that time be faced with the necessity to import 
foodstuffs to supplement our own food sup- 
plies. Some economists will argue, of course, 
that if we can manufacture goods cheaper than 
the rest of the world and exchange them for 
foodstuffs abroad, we should do so. But such 
arguments again ignore certain fundamental 
social and broad political questions. These 
dangers have become more emphasized by ex- 
perience of the war. From dependence on 
overseas supplies for food, we will, by the very 
concern that will grow in public mind as to the 
safety of these supplies, soon find ourselves 
discussing the question of dominating the seas. 
Our international relations will have become 
infinitely more complex and more difficult. 

373 



V 



HERBERT HOOVER 

Unless the League of Nations serves its ideal, 
we will need to burden ourselves with more 
taxation, to maintain great naval and military 
forces. But of far more importance than this 
is that social stability of our country, the de- 
velopment of our national life, rests in the 
spirit of our farms and surrounds our villages. 
These are the sources that have always sup- 
plied our country with its true Americanism, 
its new and fresh minds, its physical and its 
moral strength. Industry's real market is with 
the farmer by the constant increase of his stan« 
dard of living. We want our exports to grow 
in exchange for commodities we need from 
abroad, but we want them to grow in tune with 
our social and political interests, and to do so 
they must grow in step with our agriculture. 

In conclusion we are in a period of high in- 
flation and shortage of world production, and 
consequent abnormal prices. The tide is likely 
to turn almost any time. Some of the outrage- 
ous margin between the farmer and consumer 
will be remedied by the turn in the tide itself, 
for it will eliminate the marking up of goods 
and the opportunity of vicious speculation. 
The dangers of the turn are twofold. First, 
unless we constructively remedy the un- 
necessary margin between the farmer and the 
wholesaler the farmer will receive the brunt of 

374 



APPENDIX IV 

the fall long before the supplies he must buy 
and the labor he must employ will have fallen in 
step. It will bring to him the greatest suffer- 
ing in the community. 

The farmer's position can be remedied by bet- 
ter distribution of the tax load, by improvement 
in our transportation system, by getting our 
markets free of impediments to free flow of 
competition, and by constructive improvement 
in our whole distribution system. The con- 
sumer will get relief from deflation, improve- 
ment in world production, and by eliminating 
the same wastes and unnecessary costs in our 
distribution system. 

The second danger is that deflation itself will 
take place without constructive consideration. 
Great wisdom will be required on the part of 
our government in its great control of credit 
that it shall take place progressively and with 
care, in order that there shall be no sudden 
breaks, with their resulting demoralization, un- 
employment and misery. 

We require a careful balance of general in- 
dustry to agriculture. We cannot afford to 
build this nation into an industrial state de- 
pendent upon other lands for its food supply. 
We want our industries to grow, but we want 
agriculture to grow in pace with them. Many 
of our farmers made great sacrifices in the 

375 



HERBERT HOOVER 

war; they do not want to be coddled in peace; 
but they must have an equality of opportunity 
with all the other elements in the country. 



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